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benreesmanHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

But there's been this really sharp over-correction to where now an obvious thing that is just …

… But there's been this really sharp over-correction to where now an obvious thing that is just common knowledge and that was never taboo is now considered impolite to even allude to. Frontend programming is among the easier kinds of software work as measured by the number of people who can do it? I bet if I tried really hard, I could probably be pretty kickass at pickleball, small court, not a lot moving around. But to be like, that's the same thing as the NFL. No, no it's not. I would never have been able to try out for the NFL, not if I live a thousand times. There's pickleball and pro football in programming too.

Original discussionIt's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA492 source comments · at import
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JB
jbreckmckyeHN

This article is full of misrepresentations and lazy takes. The author has had other anti-JS polemics widely upvoted on HN, which were just as carelessly written. But people upvote it anyway. What is the cause of this? 1. Bad experiences with JavaScript apps that have aggregated complexity (be it essential or incidental complexity)? 2. Non-JS developers mystified and irritated at a bunch of practices they've never really internalised? 3. The undercurrent of "frontend is not real programming" prejudice that existed long before React etc al. and will continue to exist long after it?

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christophilusHN

> as measured by the number of people who can do it That’s a poor measure. It proves only that there’s a demand for such programming. I have programmed in tens of languages professionally and many more for fun. Programming is programming. I haven’t found much difference in difficulty between any of the stacks I’ve worked with. Except, maybe C++, but that’s just C++ being garbage. I now happily use Zig as an alternative, and it’s no more difficult— easier in fact— than building a well-architected, complex UI application of any kind.

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suzzer99HN

Front-end programming is easier in the sense that you can make little mistakes and your entire app doesn't fall down. As someone who's done decades of both, there's nothing conceptually easier about well-executed front-end programming over back-end. The stakes just aren't as high.

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bigbuppoHN

Most frontend development shouldn't be necessary as they're writing repetitive code that implements features that are missing from browsers. And it shouldn't be that hard to add those missing features to browsers. They're like half javascript at this point...

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jbreckmckyeHN

After looking over the author's blog I can see 1. Very high output 2. Lots of AI images 3. Weird writing and editing lapses in several posts I am moderately confident this post was written with an AI. It may not be totally AI produced, I think the author has probably edited the work, but I think we are mostly debating synthetic content.

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