Huh? There's nothing inherent to Web Components that makes this true. That's just how the author is using them.

Author is conflating multiple things.

Of course it is. Why wouldn't it be?

This way of thinking should be treated with care (caution, even), lest it end up undergirding a belief in a false dichotomy.

That can be a sort of "attractive people are shallow and dumb and unattractive people are intelligent and deep"-style mindtrap.

Relative to the experience that Golang developers are used to, yes, it's a pain.

But that isn't to say it's any more or less painful on an absolute scale, esp. wrt what comprises typical experiences in other ecosystems.

I see this a lot—and it seems like it's a lot more prevalent than it used to be—reasoning from a proxy. Like trying to suss out how competent someone is in your shared field by looking at their GitHub profile, instead just asking them questions about it (e.g. the JVM). If X is the thing you want to know about, then don't look at Y and draw conclusions that way. (See also: the X/Y problem.) There's no need to approach things in a roundabout, inefficient, error-prone manner, so don't bother trying unless you have to.

This shouldn't even be an argument. package-lock.json isn't free. It's like cutting all foods with Vitamin C out of your diet and then saying, "but you can just take vitamin supplements." The recommended solution utterly fails to account for the problem in the first place, and therefore fails to justify itself as a solution.

Give this one another go and think it through more carefully.

Use this to explain why Bernhardt's JS wat (or, really, folks' gut reaction to what they're seeing) is misleading.

again: unmatched class selectors

additionally, it's not the fact that they are unmatched (or that they are class selectors specifically) that it's a problem—it's the fact that there are a lot of them

the entire choice of focusing on classes and class selectors here is basically a red herring

That's the entire topic, my guy!

"We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serve[r]s with fewer people." is the very premise of the conversation!

Mastodon "push[ing] the direction of the protocol or make it harder to cultivate an ecosystem of smaller ones."? "it needs to be easier to start smaller ones"? Are you just not paying attention to the conversations you're responding to?

Reminds me of:

What fascinated me was that, with every single issue we discussed, we went around in a similar circle — and Kurt didn’t seem to see any problem with this, just so long as the number of 2SAT clauses that he had to resolve to get a contradiction was large enough.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=232

So make your application document-driven (i.e. actually RESTful).

It's interesting that we have Web forms and that we call them that and yet very few people seem to have grokked the significance of the term and connected it to, you know, actual forms—that you fill out on paper and hand over to someone to process, etc. The "application" lies in that latter part—the process; it is not the visual representation of any on-screen controls. So start with something like that, and then build a specialized user agent for it if you can (and if you want to). If you find that you can't? No big deal! It's not what the Web was meant for.

Why are people so seduced by this dumb argument—to the point that they almost seem proud of it?

First, it's presumptuous. Who says we're even using glibc instead of some other libc—which I just might choose to include in the projects I work on? Who says we're even using Linux, for that matter?

Secondly, even if we were, let's assume that we're not, and then see if that teaches us anything about the overall line of reasoning. The original comment was about NPM. NPM is used a fair bit for not just backend stuff but for managing packages used in the browser, too. Let's assume, for simplicity, that our program is entirely a browser-based JS+HTML+CSS app with no backend to speak of. Would the same people argue that, among other things, the Web browser sources would need to be included? Does it even make sense to argue that? Asking the system software question betrays a failure to accurately grapple with the classes of software artifacts we're dealing with, their role in the overall project, and our responsibility for them.

For checking which posts are new/updated, this is always the case. The only thing the HTTP cache-related headers can tell is that the feed itself has/hasn't changed.

Someone is going to need to eventually explain their convoluted reasons for labeling this a downside.

Sure, strictly speaking, a bigger source tree is bad, but delegating to package.json and npm install doesn't actually change anything here. It's the same amount of code whether you eagerly fetch all of it at the same time or whether you resort to late fetching.

Almost none of the hypothetical benefits apply to the way development is handled in practice. There was one arguably nice benefit, but it was a benefit for the application author's repo host (not the application author), and the argument in favor of it evaporated when GitHub acquired NPM, Inc.

No, those are orthogonal. Whether you obtain the code for your dependency* at the same time you clone your repo or whether you get it by binding by name and then late-fetching it after the clone finishes, neither approach has any irreversible, distinct consequences re bugs/fixes.

* and it still is a dependency, even when it's "vendored"...

Corollary: Spolsky (at least at the time of this article) didn't really understand types, having about the same grasp on computing fundamentals as your average C programmer.

So run a typechecker on the code to check your work if you want type checking. That is what TypeScript does, after all. And it's been around long enough that people shouldn't be making the mistake that a runtime that support dynamic types at runtime means that you can't use a static typechecker at "compile time" (i.e. while the code is still on the developer workstation).

Category error; C, C++, and Fortran are programming languages, not tech stacks.

There's a weird (read: "weirdly obvious") category error here. NodeJS is not a language. (This wouldn't be so notable if the comment didn't go on to say "The key point is writing to an interface and not an implementation.")

The puzzle piece that fits the shape of the hole here is "JS". JS is the language, NodeJS is one of its implementations—and chubot knew both of these things already, so it's odd that it was expressed this way. Plus, there's a lot more diversity of JS implementations than exist for e.g. Python...

Even most ostensible FP practitioners who swear they don't.

Until those things go away.

A case study: DuckDuckHack used Codio, which "worked" until DDG decided to call it a wrap on accepting outside contributions. DDG stopped paying for Codio, and because of that, there was no longer an easy way to replicate the development environment—the DuckDuckHack repos remained available (still do), but you can't pop over into Codio and play around with it. Furthermore, because Codio had been functioning as a sort of crutch to paper over the shortcomings in the onboarding/startup process for DuckDuckHack, there was never any pressure to make sure that contributors could easily get up and running without access to a Codio-based development environment.

It's interesting that, no matter how many times cloud-based Web IDEs have been attempted and failed to displace traditional, local development, people keep getting suckered into it, despite the history of observable downsides.

What's also interesting is the conflation of two things:

1. software that works by treating the Web browser as a ubiquitous, reliable interpreter (in a way that neither /usr/local/bin/node nor /usr/bin/python3 are reliably ubiquitous)—NB: and running locally, just like Node or Python (or go build or make run or...)—and

2. the idea that development toolchains aiming for "zero configuration and setup" should defer to and depend upon the continued operation of third-party servers

That is, even though the Web browser is an attractive target for its consistency (in behavior and availability), most Web IDE advocates aren't actually leveraging its benefits—they still end up targeting (e.g.) /usr/local/bin/node and /usr/local/python3—except the executables in question are expected to run on some server(s) instead of the contributor's own machine. These browser-based IDEs aren't so browser-based after all, since they're just shelling out to some non-browser process (over RPC over HTTP). The "World Wide Wruntime" is relegated to merely interpreting the code for a thin client that handles its half of the transactions to/from said remote processes, which end up handling the bulk of the computing (even if that computing isn't heavyweight and/or the client code on its own is full of bloat, owing to the modern trends in Web design).

It's sort of crazy how common it is to encounter this "mental slippery slope": "We can lean on the Web browser, since it's available everywhere!" → "That involves offloading it to the cloud (because that's how you 'do' stuff for the browser, right?)".

So: want to see an actual boom in collaborative development spurred by zero-configuration dev environments? The prescription is straightforward: make all these tools truly run in the browser. The experience we should all be shooting for resemble something like this: Step 1: clone the repo Step 2: double click README.html Step 3: you're off to the races—because project upstream has given you all the tools you need to nurture your desire to contribute

You can also watch this space for more examples of the need for an alternative take on working to actually manage to achieve the promise of increased collaboration through friction-free (or at least friction-reduced) development: * https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22the+repo+is+the+IDE%22 * https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22builds+and+burdens%22

Is "automated deployments" really the solution?

There's a related phenomenon/paradox: the superinferiority of "native" applications.

If what we're discussing here is the decision to no longer opt in to playing along with the "Western" regime for IP, then why would they limit themselves to Linux and Wine—two products of attempts to play by the rules of the now-deprioritized regime? Why wouldn't they react by shamelessly embracing "pirated" forms of the (Windows) systems that they clearly have a revealed preference for? If hackability is the issue*, then that's ameliorated by the fact that NT/2000 source code and XP source code was leaked awhile ago—again: the only thing stopping anyone from embracing those before was a willingness to play along and recognize that some game states are unreachable when (artificially) restricting one's own options to things that are considered legal moves. But that's not important anymore, right?

* i.e. malleability, and it's not obvious that it should be—it wasn't already, so what does this change?

In other words, do a lot of work to route around the problems introduced by the way that using npm routes around your existing version control system.

These packages don't/can't do the amount of exception handling suggested by this comment.

There's an unnecessary dichotomy here between uses JS and page is served as HTML. There's a middle ground, where the JS can do the same thing that it does now, but it only does so at edit time—in the post author's own browser, but not in others'. Once the post author is ready to publish an update, the client-side generated content is captured as plain HTML, and then they upload that. It still "uses JS", but crucially it doesn't require the visitor to have their browser do it (and for it to be repeated N times, once per page visit)...

This post is filled with programming/debugging missteps that are the result of nothing other than overlooking what's already right in front of the person who's writing.

"How much of your love of chocolate has to do with your designs for life that are informed by your religious creed? Is it incidental or essential?"

In addition to the note above about this being susceptible to sites that deny execution of inline scripts, this also isn't really solving the problem. At this point, these are effectively GreaseMonkey scripts (not bookmarklets), except initialized in a really roundabout way...

The effect of handling open source the way it's popularly practiced on GitHub does not get nearly enough scrutiny for its role in e.g. maintainer burnout. Pretty much every project I see on GitHub does things that are obviously bad—or at least it should be obvious*—and neither are they sustainable, nor even a particularly good way to try to get work done, assuming that that's your imperative. It is probably the case, however, that that assumption is a bad one.

* I've slowly come to realize and accept that this stuff is not obvious to lots of people, because it's all they know—whether that means that that should affect whether its negative consequences are obvious is something that I'm inclined heavily to argue that "no, it shouldn't affect it; it should still be obvious that it's bad even then", but empirically, it seems that my instinct is wrong.

The same is true for login systems that use cookies, but no one cites that as a downside. There's an asymmetric standard being applied to HTTP native authentication.

Like people who can't wrap their head around the idea that evolution has nothing to do with any kind of purpose to produce humans. (Even starting from the position that humans are the "end result" is fundamentally flawed.)

It was only 6 days ago that an effective takedown of this type of argument was hoisted to the top of the discussion on HN:

This latter error leads people into thinking the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole, so "When someone in my tribe does something bad, they're not really in my tribe (No True Scotsman / it's a false flag)" whereas "When someone in the other tribe does something bad, that proves that everyone in that tribe deserves to be punished".

and:

I'm pretty sure the combination of those two is 90% of the "cyclists don't obey the law" meme. When a cyclist breaks the law they make the whole out-group look bad, but a driver who breaks the law is just "one bad driver."¶ The other 10% is confirmation bias.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27816612

Restrepo, D., Armstrong, K. A., & Metlay, J. P. (2020). Annals Clinical Decision Making: Avoiding Cognitive Errors in Clinical Decision Making. Annals of Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.7326/M19-3692