GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free Software Foundation

Re:GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free So... by Agentlien on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @07:25AM (#28047928)

From someone who has never worked professionally with web development: where are we now?

I tried my hand at Dreamweaver back in the day (approx. 2005) and didn't like what it generated. I've written a few pages manually (first when learning HTML ca 2004, then for a personal website in 2014) and it felt much nicer.

I have made Windows applications with GUIs as part of my job and for that I've mainly used WPF written as a mix of XAML and C#, written by hand and inspected in the editor. There are graphical tools, but I've mostly found it more efficient to write what you mean directly.

But how are things actually done in the web development business, nowadays?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free So... by 542458 on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @08:08AM (#28048219)

Wix and Shopify are both multi billion dollar companies that give casual users access to websites that would previously require dedicated devs. This is done via elaborate WYSIWYG website editing. There used to be decent business in low-end web dev, banging out high volumes of simple websites and storefronts - but that market has been in large part taken over by WYSIWYG tools.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free So... by Jach on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @09:27AM (#28048868)

There's still decent business in sharecropping Wix/Shopify/Salesforce/etc. Very quickly companies find that the out of the box stuff doesn't do 100% of what they want, so they need to pay to get that last bit and develop custom components..which yeah, anyone can then drag onto the appropriate pages, instead of having to pay someone who happens to know how to FTP things onto a server.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free So... by meerita on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @02:53AM (#28058027)

Yes, but I meant as development not as final customer. I agree that even those examples don't affect real software projects.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free So... by deergomoo on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @10:17AM (#28049476)

> But how are things actually done in the web development business, nowadays?

We still write HTML (ish), but then we compile it into JavaScript functions, which then generate HTML again on the client.

I'm being slightly facetious, but that's basically what a modern web app written with Vue/React/Svelte/Angular does.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free So... by meerita on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @02:52AM (#28058022)

You basically open your Terminal, run dozens of NPM commands and install dozens of libs and start writing javascript, css and jsx. Then you run commands to build and deploy.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free So... by machiaweliczny on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @07:55AM (#28048155)

By hand but there's a lot of ready-made components (React).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free So... by meerita on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @02:55AM (#28058037)

And developers use zillions of libraries too. In the end devs write less code.

[ Parent | on HN ]