- The author failed to draw a clear distinction between "The Web" as an application platform and "The Web" as a network of semantic information.
- Digging deeper, "The Web" the application framework is pretty flexible. There are plenty of ways to use hypermedia and HTTP, while using your own non-HTML/CSS UI tooling.
- The article strikes me as ill-researched -- the author writes "Here’s a good blog post on Flux, the latest hot web framework from Facebook". Flux is definitely not the latest from Facebook, and some of the linked articles were from 2015. For better or worse (I think better), front-end is moving really fast, and the web platform roast listicles don't age well.
- The point about "UI Complexity" is just odd. UIs should not be complex. Comparing the windows explorer to Google docs is comparing fruits to vegetables. The point "look! we still have toolbars and shades of grey" has nothing to do with the web and everything to do with UX metaphors and familiar affordances.
- "Things as basic as UI components are a disaster zone". UI "components" are not basic! What is a component? No seriously, ask a programmer content with OO languages, and then ask someone who prefers functional languages. Then ask those developers to agree on an interface.
Though I do agree with:
- Web apps are slow. Painting is really complicated.
- So many apps are written with the assumption that they're always online. The author is right that users have low expectations when it comes to good offline experiences.
- The web wasn't designed with our contemporary single-page application use case in mind.
- JS could obviously be way better.
- The need for backwards compatibility is pretty crippling.
I'm not for calling people jerks in online forums either, but I think that in this case the point is valid. Someone is behaving like a jerk if they deny the experience of others through lack of empathy. If you (the general you, not you) respond to someone who tells you "this language makes me feel unwelcome" by arguing that their experience of the language is wrong, you are in fact being (quite literally) a jerk.
I disagree. Many people attempt to use it as a non-gendered pronoun, but I don't think that makes it inherently "gender-nonspecific".
Think of it this way. When you call a male-identifying person "guy" it affirms their gender. When you call a non-male-identifying person "guy" it passively denies theirs. "Guy" is not gender nonspecific, and when you use it that way, it has the potential to make a non-male person feel like their gender identity is being assimilated into your idea of a "guy", whatever that is.
Another thought to leave you with. "Guy" == male when the gender of the person it refers to has not been established. Suppose someone tells you "I saw this guy biking down the street the other day..." Do you ever imagine that they're talking about a woman?
If you believe this is an issue of people simply "taking offense", then I don't think you fully understand this issue. This is a matter of people feeling unwelcome and outcast. Try and place yourself in the author's shoes.
If someone is genuinely friendly and welcoming, and you reject their company because you look for and find offence where none was intended, then that's kinda your problem, not theirs.
> Your compensation isn't determined by nobility or a sense of equity.
> It's determined by the difficulty of the job.
I strongly disagree. Example: working in a sweatshop is infinitely more difficult than being a software engineer and pays infinitely less.
Your compensation is determined by a big set of factors that I'm sure a sociologist could spell out for us all. I argue that the difficulty of the job is in fact not nearly as important as other factors like race/ethnicity, gender, mental health, etc.
> When a market doesn't reflect that, it is horribly broken and will be horribly abused by the participants.
I think with "difficult" he didn't mean how physically taxing it is, but how hard it is to find people who can do it. Almost anybody can to the work in a sweat shop after a couple of days (weeks?) of training. Becoming a programmer is not something everybody can do and even for those who can it takes years of study before they are competitive on the job market.
