Got tired of React… so I tried going back to COBOL
(midwest.social)
Programmer HumorEver get the feeling that modern web dev has become… a bit too complex?
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the “good old days”. When you could just write some code, compile it, and run it without worrying about all the dependencies, the build tools, the client-side rendering, the server-side rendering, the server components, and all the other buzzwords that are thrown around in the web dev world… just code doing its thing.
And honestly, I think that feeling isn’t totally wrong. Maybe we can make things simpler, faster, more straightforward again.
So naturally… I decided to embrace the future by going back to the past: COBOL.
Here’s my (100% serious, definitely not questionable) migration story.
I know this is a joke but seriously: Modern Web development sucks!
You can always do pre-Modern web development. There's nothing stopping you.
In fact, with the modern browsers, it's better than ever.
If you just want to build a basic web page or roughly static document / form, then AI can see why it would feel like overkill.
But if you're building a full featured application then modern web development is kind of glorious.
I'll wait until modern web developers figure out how to do things without a bazillion dependencies that have new critical vulnerabilities every week and release backwards incompatible versions every month or so.
Also I don't like shipping several MB of JavaScript to the user just for a fancy looking form.
The real alternative is much more simple - static HTML + CSS with manual deployment and manual file transfer. If that's not enough, you can step-by-step add to it. There certainly are web applications that benefit from the complex defaults. I don't hate these tools per se. I hate that they are the default. Yet it only makes that most web developers need a job and to get that job they need to use an overkill stack for their personal and community projects.
If you want to hear an upside, just remember that this happens everywhere and at least the modern web dev chaos is mostly built on top of free and open-source tools and not proprietary bullshit.
Yet it only makes sense that most web developers need a job and to get that job they need to use an overkill stack for their personal and community projects.
When I was a noob learning web dev a few years back and had no sense of direction and I was doing these tutorials on Youtube where you build a 0 user CRUD app with like NextJS, typescript, all sorts of libraries for state management, data fetching, css, auth ,forms, tables, UI components, database ORM's.
It's just such nonsense, especially if you're a noob getting into all of this stuff. You think you need to know all of this so you spend your time learning more how to use these tools rather than actually solving interesting problems and learning to code. The whole ecosystem, including the content creators just encourage this.
I didn't even host my own DB, who has time for that? Just sign up for this service they do it for you bro. And at the end you would just host your site on Vercel.
And don't get me started of how quickly things just completely change there.
Modern web dev is a jungle and a mess. Complexity is the default, not something you add on later so I completely agree on your point.
Yes, but... Have you heard of Eleventy? Feed it some Markdown, and it spits out stylish HTML. Then you can transfer.
bro why the ai slop
It's a highly AI-based project. I personally appreciate the lack of subtlety.
If you don't like the images, fair. It's just that I personally prefer to have these than none at all
In case you find a reader's perspective useful: Whenever I see someone using AI images, I just close the article, as it feels very likely they used AI for the text too, and I'm not interested in consuming slop in any form.
Yeah, you wouldn't eat around the shit in the shit–stained pizza, you'd just throw the whole thing
That's definitely a choice you can make, but if I see AI at all, I immediately move on from the article or at the very least treat it as nothing of value. Other than the ethical implications of using AI, seeing it tells me the author couldn't be bothered to care about their article, and so neither will I.
Just some outside perspective and feedback from just one person.
In this fast-paced modern life, I find that I have too many complex thoughts in my head all the time. Thanks to Dr. Dijkstra's patented COBOL regimen, my brain is free and clear of any thought complex enough to hurt it. Thanks COBOL!
For anyone unfamiliar with Dr. Dijkstra's work in the field of psychotherapeutic COBOL: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.
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The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
Dr. Dijkstra, 1975
The whole paper is full of bangers. I like to imagine that he nailed it to the door of the university library.
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
EWD found an optimal path to my heart. He's one of my all-time favorites.
It goes to show, when a woman designs a programming language, it's built to last!
