It's disheartening to realize that the frontend space is no better now than when I began my career in 1990. And it's also disheartening that even though computers are like 5000 times faster now, that they feel slower to me as a developer and as an end user.
Nah, you're just focusing on the opportunities to improve rather than counting the victories. Here's my top 3 big steps forward of the last 20 years:
* Webapps don't need to be installed
* Webapps work on all platforms without vendor lock-in
* Webapps aren't trusted and get sandboxed by default
and a bunch of minor victories along the way (you can right click -> inspect every webapp, APIs generally exist and have entered the cultural lexicon, cross-site SSO exists and works).
At the same time, a lot of the UI tooling and APIs feel like we went back 30+ years. Everybody is still reinventing the pop-up menu button (aka “select”). I really thought this was a solved problem in NeXT by the early nineties.
Advancements to CSS have made front-end way more reasonably than they were in the 90s. Stuff that took weeks to figure out with tables can now be done so quickly with `display: flex` and the whole grid system. It's beautiful.
If we had `display: flex back` in 1998 I probably wouldn't have stuck with FE rather than dive into the backend.
Web dev (as in: HTML and CSS) improved a lot in the last 20-30 years. But if I had to quickly make a fully functioning interface and had the choice between today's web and 2002's Delphi 7 I'd choose Delphi 7 in a heartbeat. And just look at what non-technial people were able to do with Macromedia Flash in the early 2000s. You need experienced frontend devs to recreate what designers did as a hobby back then.
Of course those solutions don't solve the transition between desktop and mobile layout (since that wasn't a thing back then), but more some modern frameworks solve that well (like whatever MS calls UWP right now) without forcing everyone to reinvent a way to do infinite scrolling without running out of memory
If he is comparing things to 1990 then that means he's using "frontend" to included non-web UI tech as well, in which case flex vs tables isn't really the main point of comparison.
Agree. I did CSS before flexbox was available, and I have no ideas how I did before. There is tons of very good stuff coming our way in CSS (such as container queries), better ergonomics for Javascript, excellent tooling in the browser, stuff to be optimistic for, not just all this madness about the framework du jour.
I think this is what they meant by rediscovering or reinventing new things over and over. Yes, display:flex is newer than XUL and different in some ways. But 20 years on it seems disappointing that display:flex is perceived as such an advancement by those who have forgotten or never knew the past.
What? A few days ago I gave up trying to write a moderately complex component based on flex-grid. The number of options, and all the quirks of them, was overwhelming, and in the end I couldn't even get the basic behavior I wanted. Maybe i will try again some other. I think display: flex is very useful, display:grid is too complicated with the way they designed it.
> It's disheartening to realize that the frontend space is no better now than when I began my career in 1990.
I disagree. Since I started programming some 20 years ago, I relearned web (and especially JS) every 5 years or so. And each time I was pleasantly surprised at how much simpler / elegant / clean things have become.
> that they feel slower to me as a developer and as an end user.
that's true though.
It possible (and even simple!) to make web-apps that are almost just as fast, but no one does that (at least not in the main stream).
Alternative history! I began my career around the same time, and I remember applications taking minutes to start up, Word/Excel crashing and corrupting your file with regularity, and all kinds of horrible anti-patterns. Applications always are as slow as users can tolerate, which roughly end up being about the same over time, but tolerance is typically lower these days.
