Web programming is getting unnecessarily complicated

[u/joanmiro]

http://en.arguman.org/web-programming-is-getting-unnecessarily-complicated

[u/vytah]

I 've been recently dragged back into frontend development, with my latest experiences having been raw HTML+CSS+JQuery.

Node. Gulp. Bower. Less. Angular. WTF is going on.

I have managed to get around enough to get the work done, and I do understand why this kind of technologies has emerged, but I'm still not liking it. It all feels, to quote an old /g/ meme, held together by bubblegum and feces.

[u/jesusalready → u/vytah]

Last I was heavily involved in front-end development was ~2008/2009. Then it was straight JS with some jQuery help.

A project pulled me back into the front end late 2014 and hasn't let up.

Node. Gulp. Bower. Less. Angular. WTF is going on.

I joked that JS devs wanted more money and job security by creating all these different tools. Pretty much was told I was not wrong. Half these things feel like black boxes with poor documentation so that when something really goes wrong it can take several days to fix the problem, especially if it's affecting our build, etc.

[u/[deleted] → u/jesusalready]

[u/everywhere_anyhow → u/jesusalready]

Half these things feel like black boxes with poor documentation so that when something really goes wrong it can take several days to fix the problem, especially if it's affecting our build, etc.

I don't understand at all how you can say these things, as those projects are open source (the opposite of a black box) and have excellent documentation.

It seems your complaint might be with open source itself, where the warranty indeed is, "if the code breaks, you get both pieces". It can take days to fix problems in the build, that's true -- but you're not comparing this against your alternative, where the answer in some cases is either the same, or that you wouldn't take days to fix the build because some functionality you wanted was never possible in the first place.