Why don't more developers “use the platform”?

Posted by vinhnx 19 hours ago

Why don't more developers “use the platform”?(nolanlawson.com)

272 points | 280 commentspage 4

lifeisstillgood 13 hours ago|

Mostly this is true for “internal” platforms as well. Most enterprises have some “way to do things” - and once you get beyond a few developers someone is always rolling some of their own - rarely is it obtuseness, often it’s lack of training and even awareness of the equivalent of “dialog” even exists

jappgar 11 hours ago|

Often it's that the internal platform isn't very good and not worth the trouble.

gwbas1c 4 hours ago||

The problem is that HTML, Javascript, and CSS are the wrong "low-level" abstractions. They are high-level abstractions that various web development technologies like React work around. The problem is that they try to provide a standard that solves every problem; and the market generally rejects that standard so it tries to work around it.

The right thing would be for the browser to expose much lower-level abstractions. Webassembly is a step in the right direction, but it needs an API other than HTML and calling back to Javascript.

My_Name 15 hours ago||

Personally, and this is more of a general coding thing than specific to web development, I find a number of imported items are easy to code and write myself, and thus I have control over debugging rather than submitting myself to the process of reporting a bug then hoping it will be fixed in a timely manner. I also have feature control and can avoid feature bloat, and I have full knowledge of the code I am running.

This allows me to speed up development and have a streamlined custom implementation of that feature for my code. For example, I was unhappy recently with performance and feature set in RRDTool. Seeing that updates from the dev for that are quite glacial I wrote my own implementation, which took about 20 minutes, and now I have one less import, and in the process speeded up data retrieval, so I can have 60fps graph generation, discarded unused features, and added a couple of custom ones for my application.

alvarlagerlof 6 hours ago||

It doesn't matter how often Safari released as long as updates keep on being tied to os updates. A large enough percentage of people do not upgrade their OS fast enough for new features to be broadly usable.

LunicLynx 9 hours ago||

Mostly because UX has some needs they want to fulfilled. At least that has been why we used custom pickers / dropdowns / inputs, you name it

techaqua 18 hours ago||

can the title be changed to "Why don't more developers use browser native features?"

YmiYugy 16 hours ago||

Counterpoint on Safari. Apple still ties browser updates to OS updates and there are a lot of old iPhones in circulation. Safari 16 is still a reasonable target and it’s missing a lot of modern features and has a lot of bugs to work around.

JimDabell 14 hours ago|

Safari 16 is not a reasonable target for the vast majority of developers.

Apple tends to support older iPhones in newer versions of iOS, and iPhone users upgrade their software a lot. The most common target is the last two major versions because people using older versions are so rare. Every iPhone released in the last nine years can upgrade to iOS 16 to get Safari 16.

You can download a CSV here to explore the data: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share#week...

Baseline’s support window for “Widely available” is 30 months and Safari 16 is almost twice that age: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/baseline/

If it makes sense for you to spend time supporting 0.25% of users rather than spending that time on the other 99.75% of users, then support Safari 16. Everybody else should avoid incurring that opportunity cost.

asdfsa32 8 hours ago||

This is a very bad take. There is millions and millions of devices on Safari 16.

Thinking of it as 0.25% of users is also very narrow way of thinking, 0.25% of what kind of users? who is your demographic?

JimDabell 8 hours ago||

Please refer to my first paragraph and my final paragraph.

t2r3121 8 hours ago||

Every time I try to use the platform feature I get it working well in one or two browser on either desktop, android or iOS and then later find out it works pretty badly on one of the other platforms

groundzeros2015 9 hours ago||

Because using a platform requires reading and thinking carefully and occupying the mind of someone else. It means telling business people and designers no. It requires maturity and experience to understand the true cost of custom work.

singpolyma3 8 hours ago|

> If you search for “sticky positioning” on npm, there’s no package that says “just use CSS position: sticky, you dolt.”

You could maybe find a component that all it does is apply position:sticky though?

littlecranky67 8 hours ago|

Maybe I'm too old, but remember position sticky is relatively "new" and I was around when browsers didn't support it, yet everybody demanded for "affix" solution [0] (the buzzword you would search to find a jquery plugin). Internet Explorer never had position: sticky, and FF only introduced it in 2014. And I dealt with projects until around at least 2017/2018 where enterprise clients would make any webdev required to run on IE12 too.

[0]: https://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap/bootstrap_affix.asp

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