While directionally correct, the article spends a lot of time glorifying jquery and not enough on what a horrible, no good, unoptimized mess of a framework jquery was, and by extension what kinds of websites were built back then. I remember those times well. The reason to use React isn't because it was new, far from it. It was because it won vs. Ember, Angular, et. al. in 2014-2015? as the best abstraction because it was easiest to reason about. It still wasn't great. In fact, still isn't great. But it's the best blend of many leaky abstractions we use to code against the browser apis.
I enjoyed reading this article but I think the author overlooked that "low-level" languages aren't just less supported, they're also character-dense. You can accomplish more with less, simply because it's a higher level abstraction. If you choose to abstract through this problem, aren't you creating a high-level language?
My exact complaint. What is the "handmade" community? At first I thought he was talking about woodworking or knitting.
Also the reddit comparison is great, but I wish he would have talked about why the slop is there in the first place.
I'm pretty sure new reddit isn't optimized for speed, it's optimized for analytics and datamining.
I bet they use all those backend calls to get really granular session info. When something is super slow, it's not that it's unoptimized, but rather it's optimized for money over user experience.
This is a good reminder that abstractions are supposed to help us solve problems rather than just hide the details. I feel like I spend too much time fighting against tools that try to prevent me from seeing how things really work.
While directionally correct, the article spends a lot of time glorifying jquery and not enough on what a horrible, no good, unoptimized mess of a framework jquery was, and by extension what kinds of websites were built back then. I remember those times well. The reason to use React isn't because it was new, far from it. It was because it won vs. Ember, Angular, et. al. in 2014-2015? as the best abstraction because it was easiest to reason about. It still wasn't great. In fact, still isn't great. But it's the best blend of many leaky abstractions we use to code against the browser apis.
I enjoyed reading this article but I think the author overlooked that "low-level" languages aren't just less supported, they're also character-dense. You can accomplish more with less, simply because it's a higher level abstraction. If you choose to abstract through this problem, aren't you creating a high-level language?
While I am totally on board with the idea... the article doesn't really say what to actually do to help?
"we at Handmade community" - and no link to that community anywhere
blog itself? 2 posts a year, and 2025 posts aren't even on the blog itself (just redirects)
Yes, tooling and toolmaking should be promoted - but promotion itself should also be accessible somehow?
My exact complaint. What is the "handmade" community? At first I thought he was talking about woodworking or knitting.
Also the reddit comparison is great, but I wish he would have talked about why the slop is there in the first place.
I'm pretty sure new reddit isn't optimized for speed, it's optimized for analytics and datamining.
I bet they use all those backend calls to get really granular session info. When something is super slow, it's not that it's unoptimized, but rather it's optimized for money over user experience.
Side note, but this article reads like a Wes Anderson film, if that makes any sense.
I haven't seen his whole filmography, but I can see Asteroid City in this, yeah.
This is a good reminder that abstractions are supposed to help us solve problems rather than just hide the details. I feel like I spend too much time fighting against tools that try to prevent me from seeing how things really work.