Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Well, it's very funny, but it also points to an important architectural bottleneck for modern web applications. There's a veritable explosion of combinatorial front-end projects: 'projects' which merely exist because of the ad hoc way in which these individual technologies can be combined. They add nothing in and of themselves.

For a traditional programmer, this is equivalent to a (very public) proliferation of "convenience" interfaces or methods, yielding one "convenience" method for every possible combination of real method calls. With such a proliferation, these methods cause a great deal more inconvenience then they alleviate, and the situation becomes absurd. (For some reason, Twitter's Boilerplate release has spawned an incredible number of mis-guided "me too" fork-projects that basically roll in <insert technology here> into the Boilerplate project and release it as new.)

So, the serious message is that a) people need to stop with the combinatorial responsive html5 boilerplate bootstrap projects, and b) there's a real architectural problem that needs solving on the front-end of the web. Basically, we need a module system for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. (And it's shocking that such a thing doesn't exist, apart from ad hoc, essentially proprietary solutions like WordPress themes.)




Yea, when I was a wee programmer, I made a "class" for socket.h which was just a wrapper that mapped things to a class, so when you wanted to create a socket connection, you just created an instance of that class, and start using it. It was pretty dumb, but I thought it was cool at the time. I should have overridden the << and >> operators but I was just happy that my "send" and "receive" worked. That was when I was 21, about twelve years ago. Now you see these kids doing something similar, but they have a website on which to place their experiments. I don't hate on them because I was there once myself, but I don't pay them much attention either.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: