Opinionated vs modular web frameworks

[OvermindDL1]

@Crowdhailer

Do you use these much. The people working on our front end have pretty much stopped using form helpers. Also as a change to the API is a breaking change a hard coded url is also not much of a hardship

I have and use a substantial amount of html helpers, though we have a fairly dynamic-looking website that uses special DOM and CSS constructs without javascript (while falling back to text browsers) but it works exceptionally well.

@Qqwy

Except that side-effects like printing IO are accessible to you at any time. (And that’s not really a bad thing – it makes debugging a whole lot easier; in Haskell there are weird ‘hacks’ like UnsafePerformIO for exactly this reason – ). And I guess that ETS also breaks the ‘immutability’-world a little bit? (Of course, it, just like the process-dictionary, are mainly to be used as optimizations rather than initial go-to tools).

The only real side effect for an erlang process is sending a message, and yes things like IO and so forth are message sending (and ETS can be treated as such), but anything that is not message sending is pure, the message sending is like an algebraic effect, which is an entirely functional concept.

@dimitarvp

IMO that discussion is impossible without including programmer productivity. I can agree that a statically and strongly typed language can rid you of a class of bugs from the get go, but is it really quicker and less tedious coding in the said language? That’s an interesting discussion IMO and it already has been had on this forum several times, sadly without a definitive conclusion.

Try something like OCaml, and leave out all the type declarations on functions and bindings that you can, you’ll see how fast you can program in it while catching entire swaths of bugs that would otherwise fall in. ^.^

@dimitarvp

I feel both the business and part of the programmers very easily hand-wave human happiness away while working – “it’s a job”, “put on your big boy pants”, “job is hard, deal with it” and a whole other class of such BS – and that’s a huge mistake; I lost count on the amount of times I’ve seen VERY talented programmers leave because nobody addressed 1-2 pretty small work condition circumstances which could have been easily addressed but nobody cared because it didn’t make the organization money (it wouldn’t lose them money either – management simply didn’t care).

That is very much my last job, I love my current job, I gave up a lot of money just for this happiness.

@dimitarvp

There are many sites that simply work better if they are server-side rendered, f.ex. governmental agencies open data portals. Being server-side rendered also helps organizations scrape their data without the agency investing in API gateways (seen that shameful practice probably 50 times in my life so far). But let’s not hang on to one example, there really are multitude of cases when JS is simply superfluous and is many times shoehorned without question.

Yep, I HAVE to support javascript-less screen-readers (and text browsers as well for my own use), so I go through a lot of effort to have the site by progressively enhanced by javascript, but is otherwise fully functional without it.

I may have acquired a bit of hatred for websites that don’t fall back gracefully without javascript and css and so forth, I’ve seen how the people that use screen readers have a hell of a time using them and these are their only interfaces to the Internet… Like there is no way they could use these forums without the mailing-list interface… >.>

[dimitarvp]

@OvermindDL1

I may have acquired a bit of hatred for websites that don’t fall back gracefully without javascript and css and so forth

Even if we leave screen readers aside – which we shouldn’t because many disabled people can only entertain themselves through the internet! – we absolutely positively have a responsibility to enable the next giant leap of our Information Age (as book writers and other people call it) because it’s on the horizon already. This enablement must come through all the info on the internet beeing free and easy to gather (scrapers) and subsequently categorized (via semantic ontologies and such).

That being said, most startups make money through selling the personal data of their former customers – after their inevitable crash – so NOT having that info freely accessible for a future A.I. to suck into its ginormous database might be the better option.

[samphilipd]

Link helpers are useful for turning regular links into POSTS, adding params etc

[Crowdhailer]

That is a fair point, I was adding a link helper today for a delete link. In the end I did wonder if there was value in not being able to do some of these thinks. If I spend any time thinking about the web semantics then I’m not sure I like how easy it is to make a DELETE link

[Crowdhailer]

This talk has some nice points on “tools for though”. e.g.

You can make general things more powerful by applying other things to them. but you can’t go the other way round [make powerful abstractions more general]

~28min in.

I think I weigh up opinionated frameworks on the same scale. It’s not really possible to make them less opinionated so you have to hope they hit a sweet spot for you.