And the result, of course, is an unmaintainable stack of dependencies and inefficiencies. Any time anything changes, anywhere, the whole thing falls apart again.

Security folks talk about "threat surface" - I wonder if it would help to have an idea of "development surface" to signify the risks of bloat and dependency chaining?

Node allows you to run isomorphic JavaScript that runs on both your server side and client side (to ensure you don't end up with the Angular-style skeleton pages coming from the server), You can pick a nice ORM (like sequelize) to abstract away SQL, and Webpack allows modules to specify their styles in JavaScript to allow compossible CSS for each given page.

Yes this is still using a couple of frameworks, but I personally prefer the approach of a lightweight standard library to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that other languages have.

But then you're writing JavaScript on the server side, and I think I'd rather shove live weasels down my trousers than write one line more of JavaScript than I absolutely must.

In JavaScript, `4 / "cake"` returns `NaN`, which is sensible, but if I wanted to check whether I just accidentally did a bad division, `(4 / "cake") === NaN` will lie to me.

There are LOTS of quirks like this. JS is like a floor with boards missing all over the place. Yes, if you've walked on it every day for years, you've already stepped in every hole and know where they are. But that doesn't make it a good floor.

A good language is consistent. JS is not.

The fact that it now has fast implementations has nothing to do with it. This car goes 300mph, but don't use the left turn signal on Tuesdays because that sucker will blow you up.

Uh, so two things here. First, even though it's a dynamic language you should know what your code is doing. Your code should never be be "accidentally" doing this. That would be very poor design outside of an accidental bug.

Second, some other dynamic languages do this or other weird type coercion (I mean type coercion exists for a reason; sounds like you're against it in general which is separate from JavaScript). PHP simply extracts numbers from strings and uses them in this case. Many languages use + as a concatenation operator JavaScript just doesn't have a good way to override it so it could work properly in all cases.

> In JavaScript, `4 / "cake"` returns `NaN`, which is sensible, but if I wanted to check whether I just accidentally did a bad division, `(4 / "cake") === NaN` will lie to me.

It's not lying to you; you're using a feature of the language wrong. That's like calling the wrong validation function and getting upset because it's not working like you wanted it to (because there is a validation function for NaN). At the same time a good design won't run into this issue anyway. Now I'll admit NaN is a bit of an oddball so yes it's not the most intuitive but at the same time don't say the language is lying to you.

> There are LOTS of quirks like this. JS is like a floor with boards missing all over the place. Yes, if you've walked on it every day for years, you've already stepped in every hole and know where they are. But that doesn't make it a good floor.

> A good language is consistent. JS is not.

Not really. This is the common statement repeated by those who don't use JavaScript and consider it an awful language. If you're following best practices I'd love to know where all these language quirks or inconsistencies are because I'm for sure not running into them.

> 0.0/0.0 == Double.NaN

false

Sure, there are features that JavaScript lacks compared to other object-oriented languages, but saying that it's not object-oriented is like saying that it's statically typed. It's just wrong, the language is full of objects.

And in Javascript, it's still a nightmare importing a file. You either have a or you are on nodejs.

I'm gonna stop you right there. Node is a helpful tool and I enjoy using it, but Sequelize was nothing but pure pain when I used it. You're much better off running raw SQL, or using a query builder like KnexJS.

I would never use Sequelize for more than a 1-table read or update.

    const results = await sql.query`
      SELECT ...
      WHERE foo = ${bar}
    `;

    if (!results && results.length) return;
    await myQueue.add(results);

The backtick feature in ES2015 is really cool and allows for some great DSL type features.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/mssql-ng

(React, Node, sequelize, I'm not counting webpack but I probably would if it's anything like as much of a pain as Grunt or Gulp or... And as you say, this is the lightweight version.)

If we're going to count frameworks, there'd be no end it. As I once said, programming is abstraction upon abstraction.

Like an onion, a Russia doll or better still, inception.

Frameworks abound everywhere, at every layer. You just need to adjust your scope as you see fit, to find them.

More to the point, .NET was designed from the get go as an enterprise programming language. The web was not designed from the beginning to be a universal application platform, it was designed to display formatted hyperlinked text. Much of the hack-y feel of today's web development -- as well as other aspects such as the rather poor security -- springs from this. If the web were designed from the get-go to be a universal sandboxed application platform, I feel that many things (ranging from the scripting language choice to the DOM model) would have looked a lot different today. Standard, non interactive HTML + CSS (what the web was designed for) certainly doesn't feel too hacky after all.

Prefer winform? That's much like react without using jsx, and if yoy want fancy graphics is much more complicated than html. Now sure you can stick to system style, but you can also buy css themes, use bootstrap, material ui frameworks to have your already prepared ui in html too.

Same issues with qt libraries... The thing is simple: inevitably you need more layer of complexity if you need to be able to maintain the code while being open to changes.

For simple apps, sure winform is faster, for complex apps, no way, it's the same.

And you can't really say that.net is a single framework when it includes so much stuff that is bigger than react, node, webpack, css and html put together

Web programming is more fragmented in nature, for better or worse. I think that was more my point with the first paragraph (and also a response that most .NET programmers don't need to care too much about any backbone frameworks .NET was built on). .NET provides you with a full front-to-back ecosystem. With web applications, you usually chose, at minimum, some form of Javascript framework, some back end framework, and some form of style framework. (Full stack frameworks for some reason have not taken off in the web ecosystem.) Even that description simplifies some of the fragmentation, due to the bewildering amount of choice. If you want to implement a Flux pattern in React for instance, there are over a dozen versions out there to chose from.

I don't think this necessarily says anything about app complexity or speed of development at all, agreed. Complex apps are going to be the same. I do think that the current fragmented, churn-y nature of the Javascript ecosystem can be a barrier to entry for simple apps at the moment; for that reason, I'll welcome the day when the Javascript ecosystem reaches peak "Javascript fatigue", becomes a bit more stabilized.

Also, if you need a backend even if it's written in same language, is still a different thing, much like node and web javascript. Choosing a different backend languages usually is made because of the advantages it brings (Rails for prototyping, Erlang or Elixir for stability, Java for performance and so on)

- WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET etc. etc. are all officially part of the .NET Framework.

- WPF doesn't do much (or any) direct interaction with Win32. It uses Direct#D for rendering.

- The CLR is the .NET equivalent of the JVM.

It's useful to look at the .NET Framework the same way as the standard library that ships with the JVM. They're both large standard libraries that include GUI Library (AWT, Swing, JavaFX, Winforms, WPF), database access (JDBC, ADO.NET).

In both cases, the extensive standard library can easily be used by multiple languages (i.e. VB, C#, F# in .NET, Java, Scala, Clojure and many others on the JVM).

SQL already is an abstraction, why would I want to abstract it away? Why not abstract JS away instead?

Funny story, that's how I've been describing the issue with how errors have been handled on the project I'm working on, where there are SO many areas where errors are just ignored... so they don't propagate up the chain/stack... doubly annoying in a node environment where it's all supposed to be error first (as in the first thing you think about and check for).

Lots of projects are already doing this: Elm, ClojureScript, PureScript, etc.

250mb worth of dependecies later...

That comes at a cost, namely when someone has a special requirement, then that person has to dig very deep into your framework.

It's almost the same like Java GWT or Vaddin. If you stick to the recommended way, everything is just fine, but don't ever try to solve some exceptional problem because then you are in a world of pain where it's just smarter to embrace JS and CSS.

The problem is, abstracting things away doesn't make them disappear, because WEB DEVELOPMENT IS BROKEN BY DESIGN.

I never used your app nor do I know how it behaves, this is just general speaking about the scenario when people try to 'abstract' things away, I hope you understand that I'm not speaking about your app but the idea of hiding things.

The sames goes for all those frameworks who tried to hide HTTP ( I'm looking at you asp.net and some older Java frameworks ), this lead to a pile of shit, newer frameworks accept the fact that we use HTTP and we got less problems by doing that.

Since you mentioned ORM's, it's called the Vietnam of computer science[0], everyone tries to hide SQL, if you are doing some basic CRUD applications everything is fine but if you need more sophisticated queries you are already fighting the ORM which is supposed to help you and not making you developer life miserable, we don't need another DSL for databases, SQL is already the best language to make queries.

I guess, what I'm trying to point out here is that I use those simple tools because I know my way around, I know how to debug it which wouldn't be possible with some abstraction.

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/object-relational-mapping-is-t...

The tradeoff is that if you want to use an obscure feature of the underlying platform (and boy does the web have those), you need to explicitly abandon our abstraction. There's always an escape hatch for this - you can drop down and write HTML/JS/CSS if you need to. (And something similar on the server side too.)

All abstractions leak. Anvil leaks deliberately and rarely, whereas abstractions built in the classic HTML/JS/CSS world leak constantly and unpredictably. We think that's worth the trade-off.

I haven't done it myself, but you could try to replace most of your stack from the database up, with a single language:

http://www.swi-prolog.org/FAQ/PrologLAMP.txt

You'll still need the three stooges but at least you'll have a single language behind them.

If you're going to call HTML a programming language than when you talk about server-side work you must include XML as a programming language (I see markup far different, more simplistic than a programming language). CSS is simply properties applied to the same markup but I digress; I could see the argument argued either way.

Regardless, you can minimize what you're saying down to just HTML, CSS and a server-side language. You can make good applications without a single line of JavaScript and depending on your purpose you may not need persistent storage in the backend. In fact you can write an entire web application with just HTML, CSS and JS if you want and have no backend (beyond a CDN unless you want to be super pedantic and call that a "backend" but I think that would exceptionally overstate what it does).

> And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them:

God, you don't need any of these. JS isn't that bad anymore. It's actually kinda nice in some ways. Same with CSS it's rather easy and there are far lighter projects than bootstrap if you want to do minimal stuff, quickly (but there isn't any reason you can't look at tutorials if you're new and get a CSS layout working pretty quickly sans framework).

For server side this depends on your language. Node has a great built in http capability that many seem to ignore (it's quite easy to write your own web server using it; in fact it doesn't take much more code than plugging into express or hapi). Alternatively other languages have even better, built-in ways of handling server-side logic.

> ...and often...

Ugh, SQL is so easy I don't understand why people even bother with these. Every single time I've been involved in a team that used these abstractions it worked great initially and then steered us off a cliff in the end.

Just don't. RDMS is easy.

Whatever they are, they're complicated. They've each got syntax, enormous sets of tags/keywords to learn, and quirks coming out of their ears. There are even people down-thread pointing out that HTML+CSS is Turing complete.

> God, you don't need any of these [abstractions]

With respect, almost everyone else in this thread seems to disagree with you. I'd challenge you to find a major public-facing web app written with - let's be charitable - fewer than two of the frameworks on that list.

I do tend to agree with you on the merits of SQL, though. We built a very simple database for Anvil, that doesn't do anything except store and retrieve tuples of data, and for anything more complicated, we say "great, SQL is over there" :-P

Just like with C++ you don't have to use all of those fancy features. You can use CSS as simply properties on many web applications. They can be as complex or as simple as need be.

> With respect, almost everyone else in this thread seems to disagree with you. I'd challenge you to find a major public-facing web app written with - let's be charitable - fewer than two of the frameworks on that list.

I actually work on one during my day job that is used by millions of people :). Though in fairness we're transitioning to a single framework rather than the hand rolled one.

Frameworks have their use cases. Native also has its. For whatever reason people today are taught they have to use at least one otherwise they're throwing their time away or they can't interoperate with others which are both not true.

I'm beginning to think I need to work on a web series around creating web applications without frameworks.

> I do tend to agree with you on the merits of SQL, though. We built a very simple database for Anvil, that doesn't do anything except store and retrieve tuples of data, and for anything more complicated, we say "great, SQL is over there" :-P

This seems to be the exact type of scenario I've seen played out countless times in my career but the easy start of ORMs sucks people in every time (though I honestly think starting without an ORM is also super simple but I think many of them abstract away schemas which, if you just want to jump into something, can seemingly get in the way.

five languages in 7 lines of code -- how now to do web development : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492321

We might need less abstraction, and let the engineers work that out.

Front-end on the other end is a mess. JS/HTML/CSS as tools are clearly unfit for the current needs.

Front-end frameworks tend to move laterally; e.g. implementing a new design pattern or changing the workflow with an existing API.

Back-End frameworks tend to move vertically; e.g. adding new features or abstractions and developing generic bootstrapping procedures.

I'm glad you brought up Django here. I work with Django as my primary back-end. I think it does a great job abstracting the stuff you don't normally need to worry about while persisting the ability to modify it if need be. It seems like every update to Django is designed to make the developer's life easier. It doesn't require complicated build tools. It has a built in dev server. It includes a fantastic and secure ORM. It has it's own easy to use templating language. You can build an entire web application with Django and no 3rd-party packages if you wanted to. Contrast that with something like Node/Express/whatever and you can see the two different camps of developers a bit more clearly.

Sure, maybe my Python runtime is slightly slower than a Node runtime. Maybe the lack of async request handling(not really a problem with channels or celery) means I can't handle as many concurrent requests. Here's the thing. Hardware is cheaper than developer time. If I have an overloaded server, I can just spin up another with the push of a button and pay 10 bucks to run it for a whole month. 10 bucks is like 20 minutes of developer pay.

That's not to knock on Node, it has it's use cases, but the ecosystem it exists in is one of infinite dependencies and breaking changes.

In conclusion, I think back-end frameworks do change. I believe that changes to back-end frameworks have a different velocity to those on the front-end. I also believe that the changes made are a direct result of a framework's ecosystem. I hope that made sense.

HTML is akin to translating. I know devs who have done front end for 20 years who can't begin to wrap their heads around scripting because it's not just wrapping text in brackets to translate to a screen, but they can pull of tricks in CSS like a shark breathes water. Yes, CSS is a mess and I think a lot of that was trial and error and needs to be standardized, but it's an example still of working to make something that is already there do its job better rather than making something new and shiny to replace it so you can add another language to your portfolio.

    * JavaScript (client and server)
    * Redux (state management)
    * React (UI Control framework)
    * MaterialUI Controls (toolkit, one of many)
    * JS Friendly DB

I don't want to knock these tools too hard, because I can readily believe that (eg) Flow, or Typescript, or whatever we'll all be using next week, is much better than using vanilla JS/CSS. But the fact that we need to know all of Flow, and all of JS, and all of bootstrap, and all of CSS, and we're still not even off the client yet, is exactly why the web is a mess.

It's better to have everyone experimenting, blogging and doing their thing, and the best ideas rise to the top.

2015 was probably the worst time to be a web developer on a greenfield project. You had Angular deprecation and the Flux wars, and Babel 5 -> 6 migration.

I do agree its a mess and a freaking nightmare most of the time. I've spent hundreds of hours setting my toolchain up and if something like webpack were to lose favour, I would be devastated.

I think we are in need of a Rails for modern JS. My prediction is that we will see this emerge soon. A shift from project-templates to simple, generic plugin system. Webpack seems quite strong as the packager. Angular 2 CLI just migrated to webpack from Brocolli for example. React and Redux are standard now. And npm is the package manager of choice.

Back in 2009, I worked on a complex SPA using GWT. With GWT, you could pretend to know nothing about HTML/CSS by just using the ugly build in components, but none of the GWT users I met did that. Our app used a Model-View-Presenter structure, dependency injection, and event bus for asynchronous communication to let components know when their data had updated, plus UIBinder templates for defining the look of components (which are mostly just HTML and CSS). So although it was nicely structured, it was very much a web app, and the development experience felt pretty comparable to what I experience in React today.

XAML is mostly just a way to declaratively specify the layout and structure of UI components. Actually, I think it's just a declarative syntax for creating a hierarchy of object instances. If I remember correctly, the XAML and its corresponding C# file are both partial implementations of the same class, since .NET allows partial classes.

Now, I'm not saying that I think the current state of JavaScript tooling is the worst thing ever. But I do think that that some of the 2009-2010 era JavaScript frameworks provided a more sane and cohesive development experience. React and Angular are nice, but I also remember that in 2010 it felt pretty neat to create an interface in OSX's Interface Builder, and have it show up in my browser exactly the way I'd drawn it.

By XAML I guess I mean WPF or whatever it is called. The bet was that Silverlight would be installed in every browser and you could build more powerful apps. I remember reading a post about how Evernote rewrote their WPF app because performance was never good enough.

GWT tried to make a nicer API for building UIs. The API was nice, but I guess the whole transpilation caused issues with debugging etc.

---

HTML, JS, CSS is evolving in such unpredictable ways, each time getting better and better. It just has such a large community using it and experimenting with it all the time - I don't think anyone can compete with the hive mind of web devs.

[0] http://blog.runnable.com/post/149000201856/think-before-you-...

[1] if you haven't used angular, ask someone who has

It's also more difficult to follow practices like quickly rendering above the fold content; when you use the normal practice of writing re-usable directives, you end up needing to wait until at least Angular and any dependencies are loaded prior to being able to render any content at all. Server side rendering of initial content helps to alleviate that quite a bit since even though the content may not be interactive until your app bootstraps, the perceived load time is much better as the user has something to look at.

We just need to standardize the glue...

Once we've completely made the ES2015 transition (at least for front end modules), we might be in a position to see some really great front end tooling.

But after reading the justification it will be better in the long run.

We just need some way to lazy load modules.

The approach itself yielded the issues such as that you reference, which have only been partially resolved by subsequent iterations of the same approach. I don't believe we should give credit for an approach that yields what is still a net-negative.

It's a new thinking that we need, not reluctant acceptance of the best sub optimal execution the old thinking can deliver.

Five or six competing frameworks that do the same thing in different, incompatible ways, because either the guy who understood EXT-JS left the company or one group like jQuery better than DOJO and they both went off to do their own things only to be brought back together later.

Many languages (in the formal sense) aren't Turing complete, so this certainly isn't a requirement to be a formal language. It would be odd to come up with a definition of language that excludes regular languages, for example.

TBF you did say "programming language", not just "language". But once we move from the mathematical setting of formal languages into the informal engineering setting of programming languages, I don't see why a formal concept such as Turing completeness should be the deciding criterion for what constitutes a programming language.

I think a more reasonable criterion is that a programming language needs to have at least 1) a syntax; 2) a semantics or an implementation that could, with enough effort, be given a semantics; and 3) whose primary use is giving instructions to some computational machine (Turing or otherwise).

According to this criterion, SQL is certainly a language.

If you think about it for a moment, HTML and CSS are perfectly reasonable languages as well. Their semantics, however hairy, would be given for instance terms of manipulating objects in R^2.

The syntax/semantics/instructions option seems like a way better basis. And honestly, most of us can get by with a Potter Stewart style standard of "know it when I see it".

As does SQL : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/900055/is-sql-or-even-tsq...