This got to me:
> For a certain type of developer, building things yourself is just more fun
The platform APIs were terrible. React wasn't "more fun"... it just made it possible to do things with the platform that were extremely difficult and cumbersome to get working reliably with platform APIs alone.
To me, web components were an incredible idea poorly implemented. Most of the minimal adoption happened on top of frameworks like Lit that wrapped WCs to try to make the dev experience tolerable.
In urban planning they have a concept called "desire paths" where if you don't put sidewalks and pathways in the right places, people invent their own. I feel like the web community has spent a lot of time and effort patching the platform.
Now credit where credit is due: it has very much improved. And modern standards means it really is time to re-evaluate where and when you need these patches. But don't write off all that annoying and painful effort people put in to trying to making the platform deliver it's promised potential just to "building it yourself is more fun".
After doing this for more than 20 years I have asked that question hundreds of times and the answer is almost always about aesthetics, about 95%+. Of those aesthetics based conclusions most people cannot find their own way to handle it without waiting for somebody else to write a tool that provides the answer they were looking for. Even then the answer tends to be predicated on social acceptance more than technical evaluation. That is a training or human performance problem more than a technical problem. It says a lot about an industry where the people who are able to ask these kinds of questions realize its a training problem and are willing to raise salaries and assume tech debt as opposed to fixing a human capital problem for far less money.
At any rate there is something to be said for the developer who builds things on their own just for themselves. In many cases the result is faster, lighter, and more capable software than what they are paid to do for their employer. Their personal software isn't locked into conventions or abstractions beyond their control.
Most browser things live in a bubble of ignorance about what people are trying to build.
It's not overly ambitious to have rich text input fields or a sortable table. If you can have a half assed xpath implementation you can have a shopping cart and a product.
Someone knowledgable once ran off with a fumble of mine acting like I pulled gold from thin air.
It took the id's from the page, created strings with the same name containing the inner html, made a copy, compared the copy with the string every 50ms, if they were no longer the same the dom node and the copy were updated with the new value. Input fields compared the copy with the input value as well.
So you could do:<div id="myname">my name <div>
Then do myname += "John";
Or <div id="a">42<div><input id="b" value="123">
toddmorey · · focus · HN ↗
The platform APIs were terrible. React wasn't "more fun"... it just made it possible to do things with the platform that were extremely difficult and cumbersome to get working reliably with platform APIs alone.
To me, web components were an incredible idea poorly implemented. Most of the minimal adoption happened on top of frameworks like Lit that wrapped WCs to try to make the dev experience tolerable.
In urban planning they have a concept called "desire paths" where if you don't put sidewalks and pathways in the right places, people invent their own. I feel like the web community has spent a lot of time and effort patching the platform.
Now credit where credit is due: it has very much improved. And modern standards means it really is time to re-evaluate where and when you need these patches. But don't write off all that annoying and painful effort people put in to trying to making the platform deliver it's promised potential just to "building it yourself is more fun".
austin-cheney · · focus · HN ↗
In what way?
After doing this for more than 20 years I have asked that question hundreds of times and the answer is almost always about aesthetics, about 95%+. Of those aesthetics based conclusions most people cannot find their own way to handle it without waiting for somebody else to write a tool that provides the answer they were looking for. Even then the answer tends to be predicated on social acceptance more than technical evaluation. That is a training or human performance problem more than a technical problem. It says a lot about an industry where the people who are able to ask these kinds of questions realize its a training problem and are willing to raise salaries and assume tech debt as opposed to fixing a human capital problem for far less money.
At any rate there is something to be said for the developer who builds things on their own just for themselves. In many cases the result is faster, lighter, and more capable software than what they are paid to do for their employer. Their personal software isn't locked into conventions or abstractions beyond their control.
econ · · focus · HN ↗
It's not overly ambitious to have rich text input fields or a sortable table. If you can have a half assed xpath implementation you can have a shopping cart and a product.
Someone knowledgable once ran off with a fumble of mine acting like I pulled gold from thin air.
It took the id's from the page, created strings with the same name containing the inner html, made a copy, compared the copy with the string every 50ms, if they were no longer the same the dom node and the copy were updated with the new value. Input fields compared the copy with the input value as well.
So you could do:<div id="myname">my name <div>
Then do myname += "John";
Or <div id="a">42<div><input id="b" value="123">
Then do a = a * b / 2
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]