I just spent five hours debugging a hydration error caused by a fucking extension.
FML. Why did I accept the web responsibility at work?! 😱
Discussion
The web is a harsh mistress
It’s amazing anything gets done. Now I’m wondering how many web apps I thought were shit and my extensions were just effing it up.
it's an overly complex system, its failure probability is extremely high given equal skill programmers compared to a simple, easy to reason about system
In the Web, you have to deal with all the usual programming problems (algorithmic efficiency, memory management), plus the DOM (HTML, CSS, SVG), plus security (XSS, XFRF, CORS), plus different browsers, different versions, desktop/mobile (touch/multitouch), plus latency, concurrency (event loops), eventual consistency (stale data), and unpredictable user behavior.
The great irony to me is the low/untouchable status of the web developer. If you can master all of the above complexity, you deserve heaps of respect.
newsflash: you can't master this level of complexity, it is like trying to crack 256 bit ciphers
it's pure luck when you get it right
winning at it is like the special olympics, you are the dumb fucks that volunteered for the most cruel and unusual punishment for a rational mind ever devised by evil humans
web browsers are the most disorganised applications in the universe, the boundaries between logical layers and domains of the system are fuzzy at best, if not outright smudgy with tasteful high speed film stippling at beyond the resolution of your retina
mobile frameworks are far more rational than web browsers
it's just absurd complexity and the degree to which it keeps getting more complex every year is alarming to me
there has to be a point at which the combinatorial potential of the change set finally exceeds human capacity to adapt
I think they refer to that as the “singularity.”
I’ve been a dev for 23 years this month. This is easily the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to learn.
It becomes obvious the slap-dash and Frankenstein way the web evolved from a static content source, to an application platform. It is not a planned system, and it suffers for it.
I’ve often joked about how the world chose a language written by one guy in two weeks to build everything in the world, but that’s truly how it is.
I do, however, deeply admire the talent that a lot of folks have who are working in that space.
> newsflash: you can't master this level of complex
Well, not with THAT attitude
there is a thing called structural limitations, they are very important to understand in all engineering disciplines
the human brain has structural limitations
as the complexity of information it manages goes up the chances of error go up with it
if you want a reliable system you remove excess complexity and layer it into separate sections that can be reasoned about separately
it's not that a programmer can't manage all of those things, just that in practise you simply cannot manage them all at once and the more they interpenetrate the less fun is the process of debugging
I think the low status comes mostly from sheer volume, with contribution from the bad tools.
There are more people developing for web than anything else. The barrier for entry is very low (free, and you can legit get started in notepad and edge if you’re a kid who don’t know better). And of course, investors demand shorter deadlines and more profits, so the already strained system just gets worse.
The result is tired, overworked, and sometimes undertrained devs making boo-boos that might not have been made otherwise.
Whatever the “current thing” is will always have the most new devs, the most new code, and the most new bugs. Not their fault, it’s just the numbers playing out.