Nowadays you would just "npm install drag-and-drop" but back then you often had to hand-roll solutions.

If anyone can dig up an ancient library on GitHub for drag-and-drop back in those days, I'd imagine it would be several thousand lines long, not to mention the absolute nightmare that testing something like this with a proper framework and accompanying testing library.

It's not insurmountable by any means, but it does have enormous inherent complexity compared to almost every other UI action there is.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

Myth: X Makes Unix “Easy to Use”

Graphical interfaces can only paper over misdesigns and kludges in the underlying operating system; they can’t eliminate them.

The “drag-and-drop” metaphor tries to cover up the Unix file system, but so little of Unix is designed for the desktop metaphor that it’s just one kludge on top of another with little holes and sharp edges popping up everywhere. Maybe the “sag-and-drop” metaphor is more appropriate for such ineffective and unreliable performance.

A shining example is Sun’s Open Windows File Manager, which goes out of its way to display core dump files as cute little red bomb icons. When you double-click on the bomb, it runs a text editor on the core dump. Harmless, but not very useful. But if you intuitively drag and drop the bomb on the DBX Debugger Tool, it does exactly what you’d expect if you were a terrorist: it ties the entire system up, as the core dump (including a huge unmapped gap of zeros) is pumped through the server and into the debugger text window, which inflates to the maximum capacity of swap space, then violently explodes, dumping an even bigger core file in place of your original one, filling up the entire file system, overwhelming the file server, and taking out the File Manager with shrapnel. (This bug has since been fixed.)

But that’s not all: the File Manager puts even more power at your fingertips if you run it as root! When you drag and drop a directory onto itself, it beeps and prints “rename: invalid argument” at the bottom of the window, then instantly deletes the entire directory tree without bothering to update the graphical directory browser.

> If anyone can dig up an ancient library on GitHub for drag-and-drop back in those days, I'd imagine it would be several thousand lines long,

I bet, JS devs love overcomplicating and obfuscating simple concepts. Spaghetti artist might be a more accurate job title than web developer.

  > What the hell do you need a library for?

Think of a grid of cards, and all the possible drag, hover, and drop state transitions it can be in with any other card, and the animations required to make it look nice

Now also consider that you need to persist the final state on the backend, and handle things like rejection, cancellation, failed updates/errors.

It becomes a massive state chart and web of complexity

If you are dragging within the paage, then the draggable “ghostl is your problem too. As is deciding whether the ghost should affirmatively snap out of and into the source and target containers (that is, whether the destination container should appear to “make room” for the ghost at some point), whether there’s a transition on that, etc.

Drag and drop in non-web GUIs have all sorts of visual affordances that are your job in HTML.

Okay, you've added a requirement. Poll the current cursor position after the first hit-test sets the dragging state and call a function to render what you what rendered there at a higher Z level than anything else. Your 30 minute job has become a 60 minute job.

> As is deciding whether the ghost should affirmatively snap out of and into the source and target containers (that is, whether the destination container should appear to “make room” for the ghost at some point), whether there’s a transition on that,

Most applications don't go this far, including your operating system like Windows that sets baseline UX expectations, so you're well beyond the default expectation for drag-and-drop. If someone asks you to implement drag-and-drop without specifying they want all the bells and whistles, and you respond it's going to take you a week because you're planning to go all-out beyond necessary business requirements, they'd have a valid reason to be like "WTF mate?". Also this is still pretty paltry and not a week's worth of work.

Do you remember what browser testing was like?

Remember the quirks of browsers’ different understanding of transparency, of z-index, of events, of DOM compliance?

I think the suggestion that getting it right could take a week in the context of a particular application is actually not particularly hyperbolic.

Mind you, I was doing cross-browser testing long enough ago that I am one of those people who can say they independently invented AJAX in-house.

The problem is that even without a framework, you didn’t have a blank slate (which would have been better). You had a moving target of blank slates, you had platform differences, you had drag vs touch-drag, entrenched older browsers and the simple frustration of testing on an array of real devices, all sorts.

Now, if you were talking about 2015, then it starts to get a bit flatter.

serious question, why, when people from a field you are unfamiliar with tell you that something has particular constraints in that field, do you confidently assert that you know better?

This is how I feel about global illumination. Game devs claim it's hard but they're just noobs who don't know how to write a lighting shader.

I'm not a game dev, but it can't be that hard.

If you want to splash up the "drop here" thing it's a frickin nightmare. The events don't fire when they should (e.g. mouse leave doesn't fire so it gets stuck, or you get duplicate events or missing events) so you get a bunch of flicker unless you do a bunch of debouncing and fail safes to cover all the browser quirkiness. And this is the easy drop-a-file scenario.

Doing all the stuff shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7v-UwpsEbk I'm not sure I'd even know where to begin.

If said this way he was a jerk. So good on em for making a joke.

"Why would this take so long?" would be better.

Could mean "I didn't know you had so much stuff on your plate that takes precedence". You're giving 0 benefit of doubt to a PM who in my opinion was right to push back because for a non-technical person it's not easy to grasp why drag and drop should be so much harder than other similar impact features.

Ah and there's the rub. A PM in a software project should not be a non-technical person (because tbh what's even the point, how would a 'non-technical' person even be able to evaluate technical decisions and their implementation?)

Would you fly in a plane, or drive over a bridge that was built under supervision of a 'non-technical' PM?

The head of a space program doesn't need to be an astronaut. An admiral doesn't have to know how to swim. A PM doesn't have to know all the various engineering disciplines the project may touch.

The comment was derisive, and therefore poor leadership. Period.

It was crazy complicated.

Simple is not simple.

I wish I was making it up.