On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 6:10 AM Andrew Glynn <aglyn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Web dev is a messy field. Not because it has grown too fast, but because > it was designed by amateurs, developed by amateurs, and continues to be so, > while depending on an underlying expertly designed system, the internet. > Non sense. Companies have been heavily involved in the developing of the web since day one. Javascript was not designed by an amateur and pretty much no web dev technologies out there not only are produced since day 1 from professional coders , web standards committess played a crucial role in the developing of web technologies. The web has always been a huge cash cow. The very fact that Javascript has the name Java is not as many developers will be quick to point unrelated Java. It is very much related. . Sun for a considerable amount of time was working on Javascript as a scripting engine targeting the web working hand in hand with Java. The relationship was sort lived but for a very long time Java was the de facto language for developing powerful web application / websites. The well known Java applets that exist even today. The reason why the web followed its own road is quite sensible. The internet was viewed as nothing more than a display of documents and made sense to use a document format (HTML) for it at the time. It was easy and accesible to anyone. None could predict the explosion of the web at the time and the future needs for much greater degree of dynamism. Neither could I and I am vicious critic of web dev. The technology evolved very fast that not even up for debate, good designs require redesigns. Redesigns require time. The web was nothing really new neither was the internet. BBS were dominating online communication and function in a very similar way that the web did later on providing, email, messages, forumes, download directories, blog posts, articles and a wealth of information through the use of a model and a regular telophone line. BBS were based on desktop technology and far better designed but they could not keep up with the incrasing demands of massive online communication so the web and the internet ignated even though internet was create far earlier than BBS. Much less likely to find cat videos because BBS was based on P2P kind of technology and was working on very limited hardware where every byte was precious. It was the failure of desktop technologies to adjust to the need for a web that lead to its seperate evolution. Java was the only language that took a serious interest into web developing and even Java was unwilling to adjust to the needs of the web leading to the massive failure of the Java applet. On the other hand Flash that was specifically designed for the web , flourished for many years till HTML and JS finally caught up. Amateurs also play a very importan role in the evolution of graphics and guis. Teenage hackers were the ones to ignite the trend of computer graphics that lead to the establishment of GUI and 3d graphics as well as computer audio even though those technologies have existed far earlier it was their innovation that managed to take advantage of clever solution to overcome extreme limitations of the hardware. This happened through the developing of "demos" giving rise to a completely new community of extrmely knowledgable amateurs knows as "demoscene" and hackers. 3d graphics to this day remain the most fast moving / evolving field of computer science challanged only by AI. Plus Amateurs play a vital role in many other fields like Astronomy , their contribution is so substabtial that many celestial bodies are named after them. Amateurs have usually far higher level of knowledge of a field mainly because they tend to avoid specialisation and they do not operate on the time constraints or have to fight a backward thinking management department that want to do things "the popular" way. For similar reason they pay far more respect to designs as well. So it was both the failure of desktop to take into serious consideration the new web needs and the rapid evolution of the web based on the format that it was already problematic. It was companies themselves that hindered and keep hindering its evolution with being stuck on bad design for the shake of backward compatibility. On the other hand desktop has it own share of ugliness and "amateurism" biggest example being MFC , Microsoft's Official GUI API, that was so ugly and heavily disliked that none even question the existence of HTML because no coder in his right mind could consider imposing such a terrible design to a new technology. On similar note web is not all that bad, JS has heavily improved as a language , HTML has become extremely flexible and there are many well designed libraries like Bootstrap , D3 etc . Also desktop language learned their lesson and now fully embreace web dev at least on the back end. Finally nowdays we see the merging of web and desktop technlogies (and the branch of desktop development known as "mobile development") that has brought more sanity and uniformity into the development process. Unfortunately companies still play a very big role in the glacial evolution of the web that is fortunately dimisihing with the emergence of free software.
