[Baypiggies] What's a web developer?

K. Richard Pixley rich at noir.com
Mon Nov 2 20:02:53 CET 2009


RYAN DELUCCHI wrote:
>> Frankly, I think the world of the web browser and user interfaces is 
>> under high demand for innovation right now and will likely continue 
>> to change radically every year or two for a while.  The idea that 
>> everyone needs to know javascript will, I predict, fade in another 3 
>> - 5 years to be replaced by higher level, better designed 
>> abstractions, quite likely abstractions which marry what runs on the 
>> user's device with what runs on the server such that the pairings can 
>> be specified just once, more akin to RPC's in past decades.
> Agreed.  on the server-side (which is where I have the larger majority 
> of development experience) there seems to be a growing battle between 
> the use of dynamic-languages in-place of Java (Python being a prime 
> example here, of course).  Whereas the client-side seems to be in the 
> most flux.  The browser compatibility issue is messy and while JQuery 
> seems to help, there still are issues.  I'm relatively new to 
> client-side development (AJAX in particular).  So, I suspect the 
> issues mostly arise from use of JavaScript outside of JQuery (whether 
> it be in legacy pre-JQuery code or in JS functions that were written 
> to fill in gaps within the JQuery feature-set). 
There's an interesting analog here with native windowing systems.  The 
state of javascript and browser based presentations is surprisingly 
reminiscent of the state of windowing systems back in the early 80's.  
Reading through the documentation on the javascript frameworks 
constantly reminds me of reading through the Xtk and Xw documentation 
from early X11.  That is to say, they both address extremely similar 
problems and both do so from an extremely low level, (as distinct from 
higher level abstractions).

The world of javascript frameworks hasn't yet learned to recognize how 
to simplify usage and abstractions to the most common cases while 
retaining the ability to deviate from the common cases when desired.  
(Note that python libraries generally do this quite well, although I 
haven't figure out how the official json library fits into this pattern.)

--rich


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