Frontend is completely inaccessible to me.

From time to time I dip my toe in and try new things, but as productive as I can get with Astro, the illusion vanishes as soon as I have to understand any of the plumbing.

Fortunately, I can still party like it’s 1999 just fine: just yesterday, I worked on a janky brutalist web app (the same way I did back in 2002, cribbing from the O’Reilly “Dynamic HTML: the Definite Reference”) and “deployed” it with rsync to pico.sh. It’s practically unstyled and I didn’t even use jquery, but it works.

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moron4hire 2 years ago | parent [-]

The thing is, backend stuff is largely solved. You need to store data? Here you go, here's a database. You need to process a bunch of strings for similarity? We got an algorithm for that.

But frontend stuff is messy. How do you tell a person what they're trying to do is wrong and they need to change their inputs? Oh, maybe we can highlight the input or we can pop a modal message. Haha, psyche! Users ignore that shit! Now what you gonna do, buddy?

Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess.

	▲	bathtub365 2 years ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Contempt for your users inevitably leads to bad products so it’s no wonder things are bad if this is the prevalent attitude among front end web developers.
	▲	mattpallissard 2 years ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess. As a backend guy who considers himself extremely fortunate that nearly all of his users/customers are technical, this got an audible chuckle out of me.
	▲	robertlagrant 2 years ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> The thing is, backend stuff is largely solved. You need to store data? Here you go, here's a database. That's like saying "You need user interaction? Here you go, here's a frontend."
	▲	busymom0 2 years ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I believe it's because on the frontend, everyone wants to look different and have a unique identity. Whereas on the backend, everyone needs to be the same to follow standard best practices.
	▲	pedroma 2 years ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I'd imagine consumer hardware is the same. For example, every Thunderbolt dock's internals are basically the same, while the outer shell tries to be as different as possible.
	▲	myth2018 2 years ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I think the biggest problem is that HTML and even HTTP weren't developed with those use cases in mind. Before WWW was a thing we already had user interfaces and the fact that current users frequently prefer those ancient, text user interfaces over modern ones tells a real LOT.
	▲	lenkite 2 years ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Well if it continues to be a mess, something like WASM-based flutter-web might just eat the frontend
	▲	2 years ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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