Webdev is a disaster

by mark | 16 Feb 2022, 11 p.m.

I started writing code in the 1980s. The platform was an Amiga 500, with an entire 512KB of RAM; the language was Microsoft Basic. I could just about render a pixel and move it. I was also still at primary school. What did you do at primary? Have your mum called after your gym plimsoll somehow ended up full of liquid? Once I realised I could make this machine do whatever I wanted, once I figured out what arcane incantations were needed, I was hooked. Add up all numbers from 1 to 100 in the blink of an eye? Yep! (This was before I learned about Gauss' trick: 1 + 2 + ... + 99 + 100 = (1 + 100) + (2 + 99) + ... = 50 x 101 = 5050)

Soon I find myself with a 486 and a copy of Yggdrasil Linux. And a tome called 'teach yourself C'. Before long I was shuffling pointers to structs around. Occasionally they worked. Ended up getting paid to write Fortran using MPI on big grids before I did a career change. Even saw something that began CBL CICS for my sins. 

Now I am here cranking out Python on websites. Boy.

Everything is a framework. Can't even spin up a website any more without learning about pushing to some remote git repository and configuring a deployment script. There will be errors. You will try to google them. You will get four hundred half hearted blog posts that tell you that what you typed will work. You can try asking on stack overflow but you will get told it is a duplicate question, the duplicate being asked in 2014 (essentially the neolithic) and not actually answered. I had a website in the late 90s. It was Notepad and FTP. Any idiot could, and did, make websites back then; that was the point. 

Documentation is extremely poor. You get lists of object methods which give no idiomatic examples of usage. You hack it to work somehow and then it turns out you are writing like an idiot and all of your user data is exposed to people called Sergey who are trying to find cycles to mine cryptocurrency. Guides, such as they are, are garbage blog posts or, worse, blog posts masquerading as static web pages that are a billion versions out of date. 

Packages. Modules. Do you use pip or brew or rpm or bbq to download all these zillion plugins you need to make anything work? It is acceptable to require every page to download 2MB of scripts and stylesheets just to render a cat picture. It's obscene. You used to get entire software suites in that space that did useful stuff! 

Javascript is a continued disaster area. Maniacally deranged type casting rules and you can never tell what a given expression will do without advanced knowledge of the runtime state. I much prefer it when an int is an int and if it overflows it is on you. 

It's quite satisfying when it works. I should've picked up fortran for GPUs instead though. Prettier.