Man, leave it to HN to turn an article that has _nothing_ to do with a specific technology (notice how the app the author makes an example of isn't even a web app?) into an excuse to soapbox about modern web development.
> It's entirely untestable, not repeatable, undocumented and just stuck together with flaky glue code.
Code that's testable, repeatable, well-documented and elegant doesn't guarantee that an application will actually meet anyone's needs in a commercially sufficient manner.
The WordPress code base is frequently criticized, and the Facebook index.php code from 2007[1] will probably make some people cringe, but these are just two of many examples demonstrating that if you want to "do well", building applications that work and meet the needs of their users is initially a lot more important than "proper technique."
This article was written for web developers, and your comment makes it clear that you are not one. You are not in the target audience and you shouldn't be upset about this.
The fact that this article is written and distributed with medium (web app) invalidates everything the author says.
It's working fine, you are using it, and millions of other people are happily using it. Web is great for users because they can do arbitrary operations with just a browser without needing to install anything.
I don't know about you, but I build web apps to help users, so it's okay for me to suffer a little pain to make users happy as a developer.
The information delivered is the author's philosophy on website design and implementation complexity.
I can easily tell that the author does not approve of overly complex websites, and thinks they lead to poor experiences for the developer and user.
Contrast this with a website for some hot new web 3.0 buzzthing, where "what is this thing" is not answered in lieu of presenting a shitload of "why we/this thing is so great". An example of this is npmjs.com. Nowhere does it actually state "this is a package manager for javascript", if you didn't already know it.
reply