Shit. You might be right, but I really thought it was caused by elephants.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Web Development Is Getting Too Complex, And It May Be Our Fault
No shit. Start by removing all pre-processors, "compilers" and other bullshit and things might get decent again. We don't need those anymore in ES6/7 what we need is decent frameworks that do things natively instead of relying on compilation.
Honestly I don't see it as more complex than the backend in that regard. There's an unlimited choice of languages and within those frameworks.
In fact less so as there's only a handful of languages for the front end.
In my experience once it's setup building is often a single command.
When working on large projects with many developers they in fact make life a lot easier imo.
If you don't have to run "a single command" it's even easier and can be deployed much faster.
Yeah but the power from a compile step comes at build time.
It's the reason we don't write in binary anymore. But binary is faster to deploy.
What are we talking about? If we can't write a pure JS application that runs on a browser without performance issues than the problem is most likely the code and not the fact that it isn't compiled. It's not like an extra 500KB of data will slow down anything on a world where people have 12GB of RAM on phones and gigabit speeds on almost everything.
I believe the price we pay by going into the compile/build is much larger than those few KB. Today everything works, tomorrow half of your compilation steps are broken because xyz package is no longe available, dead, replaced... JS was meant to be interpreted not compiled.
Look I get that this compile/build hype in JS resulted from the fact that people wanted to workaround missing features on the language, I also get that it may make development faster but now in 2024 we should really reconsider this and simplify things. JS and CSS evolved a LOT.
It's more to do with larger teams. Frameworks should make it easier for multiple people to work on a codebase. As well as allowing much larger apps with less complexity.
Yes but why do they have to be compiled? For what's worth jQuery is a framework and so is Vue without compiling.
Usually because they have their own way of defining things that isn't standard JS.
For instance Vue can be compiled if you want to make full SPAs using it.
You can build SPAs without compilation...
Ya think?
Whose fault would it be otherwise?
There's a cat parasite that gets in humans and may make them more self centered and aggressive. It may also compel us to create new JS frameworks with complex compilation steps.
But seriously the point is unless you have a large Dev team working on large projects the benefits are minimal. So we are choosing to complicate our projects for little gain.
When the author says "our" they mean Joe and Jane web dev. Some other groups they consider as possible sources of complexity are standards bodies, large tech companies, and increasing user expectations.
Well, somewhat. Even back in the early 2000s as a student, it was possible to make a (hideous) CMS out of Java Server Pages and similar technology. You've always been able to over-engineer a website.