"Side Bar" WTF

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

PJH — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 08:58:37 GMT

gu3st:
I don't know if it's the seemingly low barrier to entry (everyone and their cat can build a website)..

You make it sound like a special case. It's not. Even dead cats can get diplomas for example.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

ASheridan — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 08:49:08 GMT

pkmnfrk:
I wonder why anyone thinks this is any different from shitty ios apps that suck up battery life while doing nothing

It's not just iOS. The DrawSomething app on Android eats through my battery faster than a starving rat. It doesn't really need to run the full app in the background, but it seems to :-/

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

GNU Pepper — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:18:37 GMT

pkmnfrk:
I wonder why anyone thinks this is any different from shitty ios apps that suck up battery life while doing nothing, or desktop programs that freeze the UI at the slightest provocation. The only difference is that we look at a much broader range of websites than other types of applications, so we get a much larger sample size.

Yeah. Sometimes I catch myself thinking "I just need to get away from web development and I won't have to deal with this kind of wilful incompetence any more." Fortunately TDWTF provides me with a daily reality check for this notion.

However, I do still cling to the hope that things will improve somewhat when I eventually manage to get out of *PHP* web development. PHP development is like DeviantART: almost everybody is producing terrible, ugly things, and their eye for quality is so underdeveloped that they don't even see how bad their work is.

There are so many "PHP-only" developers with whom I've worked who actively resist the use of tools and practices that improve code quality. Things like testability, reusability, maintainability: I've seen these things dismissed as "over-engineering" by senior "PHP-only" colleagues in a couple of different workplaces at this point. There seems to be widespread belief in a sort of carte blanche artistic license when it comes to whether something is "good code" or not.

What never ceases to amaze me is the lengths these people are willing to go to in order to work around the resulting garbage. They'll happily spend an entire week testing a simple design change to an email simply because it was too much work to write code that could be tested or even executed outside of the live production environment. Why not learn from one of these experiences and next time try to avoid writing indecipherable stream-of-consciousness code?

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

joe.edwards — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:13:48 GMT

pkmnfrk:
gu3st:
ASheridan:
gu3st:
PHP doesn't really make it hard to write good code. It makes the bad code just tempting to people who aren't smart enough to make the distinction between good and bad.
The real problem though is the sheer number of bad tutorials out there still not advising about things like SQL injection, still advising the new dev to do some unbelievably stupid things.
It's not just PHP, any language can suffer from it. Consider Javascript. jQuery is one of the best and at the same time worst things to happen to it. I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser
As someone who has recently started to become knowledgeable at Javascript (after being a jQuery numpty for a long time), I can't agree with you more. There does seem to be something about the web that people manage to be absolutely retarded. I don't know if it's the seemingly low barrier to entry (everyone and their cat can build a website).. or what it is.. but the web.. people who have no business programming anything.. manage to build websites at an alarming rate.

I wonder why anyone thinks this is any different from shitty ios apps that suck up battery life while doing nothing, or desktop programs that freeze the UI at the slightest provocation. The only difference is that we look at a much broader range of websites than other types of applications, so we get a much larger sample size.

I think the difference is that the source code is easier to view so everyone can see and point and laugh. I conjecture a proportionate number of closed-source applications are just as bad under the covers.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

pkmnfrk — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 20:49:37 GMT

gu3st:
ASheridan:
gu3st:
PHP doesn't really make it hard to write good code. It makes the bad code just tempting to people who aren't smart enough to make the distinction between good and bad.
The real problem though is the sheer number of bad tutorials out there still not advising about things like SQL injection, still advising the new dev to do some unbelievably stupid things.
It's not just PHP, any language can suffer from it. Consider Javascript. jQuery is one of the best and at the same time worst things to happen to it. I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser
As someone who has recently started to become knowledgeable at Javascript (after being a jQuery numpty for a long time), I can't agree with you more. There does seem to be something about the web that people manage to be absolutely retarded. I don't know if it's the seemingly low barrier to entry (everyone and their cat can build a website).. or what it is.. but the web.. people who have no business programming anything.. manage to build websites at an alarming rate.

I wonder why anyone thinks this is any different from shitty ios apps that suck up battery life while doing nothing, or desktop programs that freeze the UI at the slightest provocation. The only difference is that we look at a much broader range of websites than other types of applications, so we get a much larger sample size.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

gu3st — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 20:23:40 GMT

ASheridan:
gu3st:
PHP doesn't really make it hard to write good code. It makes the bad code just tempting to people who aren't smart enough to make the distinction between good and bad.
The real problem though is the sheer number of bad tutorials out there still not advising about things like SQL injection, still advising the new dev to do some unbelievably stupid things.
It's not just PHP, any language can suffer from it. Consider Javascript. jQuery is one of the best and at the same time worst things to happen to it. I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser

As someone who has recently started to become knowledgeable at Javascript (after being a jQuery numpty for a long time), I can't agree with you more. There does seem to be something about the web that people manage to be absolutely retarded. I don't know if it's the seemingly low barrier to entry (everyone and their cat can build a website).. or what it is.. but the web.. people who have no business programming anything.. manage to build websites at an alarming rate.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

joe.edwards — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:26:52 GMT

My first two paragraphs were in re of a "normal event object", as in, not-jQuery.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

ASheridan — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:24:23 GMT

joe.edwards:
I do find this hard to believe, considering the total number of events a page fires off in normal use. You could see dozens of events a second just from waving your mouse around; eg mouseover, mousemove, mouseout. If it had this much overhead, I would expect these sites to perform like mud, and I really haven't seen many terribly-performing sites even when the site's author drank the whole pitcher of jQuery kool-aid.

Window.event, even considering all the proprietary extra junk that might be on it, I'd say at most has a couple dozen properties; if we guess two dozen properties at an average of 32-bits each, we only account for 768 ~~bytes~~bits (92 bytes).

A jQuery object might be as bloated as you say, I'm not sure how to actually measure it, but it sounds like a number pulled out of thin air.

jQuery creates new objects for each event that was triggered with it. It's not just a wrapper for addEventListener. That's not the only thing it does though. It creates a copy of the DOM as an object to allow it to search and manipulate the DOM more easily. Every match you make on the DOM using a jQuery selector is another object. This is what leads to the bloat.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

joe.edwards — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:13:53 GMT

blakeyrat:
A normal event object is maybe, say, 2k of various data and pointers. A jQuery event object is like 5 times the size.

[citation needed]

I do find this hard to believe, considering the total number of events a page fires off in normal use. You could see dozens of events a second just from waving your mouse around; eg mouseover, mousemove, mouseout. If it had this much overhead, I would expect these sites to perform like mud, and I really haven't seen many terribly-performing sites even when the site's author drank the whole pitcher of jQuery kool-aid.

Window.event, even considering all the proprietary extra junk that might be on it, I'd say at most has a couple dozen properties; if we guess two dozen properties at an average of 32-bits each, we only account for 768 ~~bytes~~bits (92 bytes).

A jQuery object might be as bloated as you say, I'm not sure how to actually measure it, but it sounds like a number pulled out of thin air.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

ASheridan — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:47:35 GMT

blakeyrat:
And if you're not careful, you can ... make bloat-zilla.

(first result for bloatzilla :p)

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

blakeyrat — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:14:50 GMT

What people like that don't get is the bloat jQuery adds. A normal event object is maybe, say, 2k of various data and pointers. A jQuery event object is like 5 times the size. And if you're not careful, you can wrap jQuery objects in jQuery objects in jQuery objects and make bloat-zilla.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

ASheridan — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:50:24 GMT

blakeyrat:
I blame StackOverflow for that. Problem? jQuery is the answer! No matter what the problem is! Desktop app? Well embed a Webkit so you can run jQuery! Database? Well write a quick function that can call out to jQuery! If you can't do it in jQuery it can't be done!
At least they tried to make a better programming Q&A site. "Game-ify-ing" it just made it awful again though.

This perfectly illustrates your point:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3964072/overusing-jquery

And one of the comments below is this:

"I figure if I'm going to load a library on a page, I may as well use it as much as I can. I try to get the bang for my buck (so to speak)."

With attitudes like that, no wonder it gets overused.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

Lorne Kates — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:25:02 GMT

ASheridan:
I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser

And I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuer that could be replaced with a few lines of Javascript, which could be replaced by one line of jQuery.

(Which could sometimes be replaced with zero lines of neither, if they had bothered to learn CSS)

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

blakeyrat — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:21:23 GMT

ASheridan:
It's not just PHP, any language can suffer from it. Consider Javascript. jQuery is one of the best and at the same time worst things to happen to it. I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser

I blame StackOverflow for that. Problem? jQuery is the answer! No matter what the problem is! Desktop app? Well embed a Webkit so you can run jQuery! Database? Well write a quick function that can call out to jQuery! If you can't do it in jQuery it can't be done!

At least they tried to make a better programming Q&A site. "Game-ify-ing" it just made it awful again though.

Re: I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"

ASheridan — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:31:34 GMT

gu3st:
PHP doesn't really make it hard to write good code. It makes the bad code just tempting to people who aren't smart enough to make the distinction between good and bad.

The real problem though is the sheer number of bad tutorials out there still not advising about things like SQL injection, still advising the new dev to do some unbelievably stupid things.

It's not just PHP, any language can suffer from it. Consider Javascript. jQuery is one of the best and at the same time worst things to happen to it. I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser