Journal tags: programming

I just described prototype code as code to be thrown away. On that topic…

I’ve been observing how people are programming with large language models and I’ve seen a few trends.

The first thing that just about everyone agrees on is that the code produced by a generative tool is not fit for public consumption. At least not straight away. It definitely needs to be checked and tested. If you enjoy debugging and doing code reviews, this might be right up your street.

The other option is to not use these tools for production code at all. Instead use them for throwaway code. That could be prototyping. But it could also be the code for those annoying admin tasks that you don’t do very often.

Take content migration. Say you need to grab a data dump, do some operations on the data to transform it in some way, and then pipe the results into a new content management system.

That’s almost certainly something you’d want to automate with bespoke code. Once the content migration is done, the code can be thrown away.

Read Matt’s account of coding up his Braggoscope. The code needed to spider a thousand web pages, extract data from those pages, find similarities, and output the newly-structured data in a different format.

I’ve noticed that these are just the kind of tasks that large language models are pretty good at. In effect you’re training the tool on your own very specific data and getting it to do your drudge work for you.

To me, it feels right that the usefulness happens on your own machine. You don’t put the machine-generated code in front of other humans.

A recurring theme in my writing and talks is “lay off the JavaScript, people!” But I have to make a conscious effort to specify that I mean client-side JavaScript.

I thought it would be obvious from the context that I was talking about the copious amounts of JavaScript being shipped to end users to download, parse, and execute. But nothing’s ever really obvious. If I don’t explicitly say JavaScript in the browser, then someone inevitably thinks I’m having a go at JavaScript, the language.

I have absolutely nothing against JavaScript the language. Just like I have nothing against Python or Ruby or any other language that you might write with on your machine or your web server. But as soon as you deliver bytes over the wire, I start having opinions. It just so happens that JavaScript is the universal language for client-side coding so that’s why I call for restraint with JavaScript specifically.

There was a time when JavaScript only existed in web browsers. That changed with Node. Now it’s possible to write code for your web server and code for web browsers using the same language. Very handy!

But just because it’s the same language doesn’t mean you should treat it the same in both circumstance. As Remy puts it:

There are two JavaScripts.

One for the server - where you can go wild.

One for the client - that should be thoughtful and careful.

I was reading something recently that referred to Eleventy as a JavaScript library. It really brought me up short. I mean, on the one hand, yes, it’s a library of code and it’s written in JavaScript. It is absolutely technically correct to call it a JavaScript library.

But in my mind, a JavaScript library is something you ship to web browsers—jQuery, React, Vue, and so on. Whereas Eleventy executes its code in order to generate HTML and that’s what gets sent to end users. Conceptually, it’s like the opposite of a JavaScript library. Eleventy does its work before any user requests a URL—JavaScript libraries do their work after a user requests a URL.

To me it seems obvious that there should an entirely different mindset for writing code intended for a web browser. But nothing’s ever really obvious.

I remember when Node was getting really popular and npm came along as a way to manage all the bundles of code that people were assembling in their Node programmes. Makes total sense. But then I thought I heard about people using npm to do the same thing for client-side code. “That can’t be right!” I thought. I must’ve misunderstood. So I talked to someone from npm and explained how I must be misunderstanding something.

But it turned out that people really were treating client-side JavaScript no different than server-side JavaScript. People really were pulling in megabytes of other people’s code to ship to end users so that they could, I dunno, left pad numbers or something.

Listen, I don’t care what you get up to in the privacy of your own codebase. But don’t poison the well of the web with profligate client-side JavaScript.

There’s a worrying tendency for “real” programmers look down their noses at CSS. It’s just a declarative language, they point out, not a fully-featured programming language. Heck, it isn’t even a scripting language.

That may be true, but that doesn’t mean that CSS isn’t powerful. It’s just powerful in different ways to traditional languages.

Take CSS selectors, for example. At the most basic level, they work like conditional statments. Here’s a standard if statement:

if (condition) {
// code here
}

The condition needs to evaluate to true in order for the code in the curly braces to be executed. Sound familiar?

condition {
// styles here
}

That’s a very simple mapping, but what if the conditional statement is more complicated?

if (condition1 && condition2) {
// code here
}

Well, that’s what the decendant selector does:

condition1 condition2 {
// styles here
}

In fact, we can get even more specific than that by using the child combinator, the sibling combinator, and the adjacent sibling combinator:

• condition1 > condition2
• condition1 ~ condition2
• condition2 + condition2

AND is just one part of Boolean logic. There’s also OR:

if (condition1 || condition2) {
// code here
}

In CSS, we use commas:

condition1, condition2 {
// styles here
}

We’ve even got the :not() pseudo-class to complete the set of Boolean possibilities. Once you add quantity queries into the mix, made possible by :nth-child and its ilk, CSS starts to look Turing complete. I’ve seen people build state machines using the adjacent sibling combinator and the :checked pseudo-class.

Anyway, my point here is that CSS selectors are really powerful. And yet, quite often we deliberately choose not to use that power. The entire raison d’être for OOCSS, BEM, and Smacss is to deliberately limit the power of selectors, restricting them to class selectors only.

On the face of it, this might seem like an odd choice. After all, we wouldn’t deliberately limit ourselves to a subset of a programming language, would we?

We would and we do. That’s what templating languages are for. Whether it’s PHP’s Smarty or Twig, or JavaScript’s Mustache, Nunjucks, or Handlebars, they all work by providing a deliberately small subset of features. Some pride themselves on being logic-less. If you find yourself trying to do something that the templating language doesn’t provide, that’s a good sign that you shouldn’t be trying to do it in the template at all; it should be in the controller.

So templating languages exist to enforce simplicity and ensure that the complexity happens somewhere else. It’s a similar story with BEM et al. If you find you can’t select something in the CSS, that’s a sign that you probably need to add another class name to the HTML. The complexity is confined to the markup in order to keep the CSS more straightforward, modular, and maintainable.

But let’s not forget that that’s a choice. It’s not that CSS in inherently incapable of executing complex conditions. Quite the opposite. It’s precisely because CSS selectors (and the cascade) are so powerful that we choose to put guard rails in place.

Last month I went to CSS Day in Amsterdam, as an attendee this year, not a speaker. It was an excellent conference comprising the titular CSS day and a Browser API Special the day before.

By the end of CSS Day, my brain was full. Experiencing the depth of knowledge that’s contained in CSS now made me appreciate how powerful a language it is. I mean, the basics of CSS—selectors, properties, and values—can be grasped in a day. But you can spend a lifetime trying to master the details. Heck, you could spend a lifetime trying to master just one part of CSS, like layout, or text. And there would always be more to learn.

Unlike a programming language that requires knowledge of loops, variables, and other concepts, CSS is pretty easy to pick up. Maybe it’s because of this that it has gained the reputation of being simple. It is simple in the sense of “not complex”, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Mistaking “simple” for “easy” will only lead to heartache.

I think that’s what’s happened with some programmers coming to CSS for the first time. They’ve heard it’s simple, so they assume it’s easy. But then when they try to use it, it doesn’t work. It must be the fault of the language, because they know that they are smart, and this is supposed to be easy. So they blame the language. They say it’s broken. And so they try to “fix” it by making it conform to a more programmatic way of thinking.

I can’t help but think that they would be less frustrated if they would accept that CSS is not easy. Simple, yes, but not easy. Using CSS at scale has a learning curve, just like any powerful technology. The way to deal with that is not to hammer the technology into a different shape, but to get to know it, understand it, and respect it.

ES6 introduced a whole bunch of new features to JavaScript. One of those features is the class keyword. This introduction has been accompanied by a fair amount of concern and criticism.

Here’s the issue: classes in JavaScript aren’t quite the same as classes in other programming languages. In fact, technically, JavaScript doesn’t really have classes at all. But some say that technically isn’t important. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, shouldn’t we call it a duck even if technically it’s somewhat similar—but not quite the same—species of waterfowl?

The argument for doing this is that classes are so familiar from other programming languages, that having some way of using classes in JavaScript—even if it isn’t technically the same as in other languages—brings a lot of benefit for people moving over to JavaScript from other programming languages.

But that comes with a side-effect. Anyone learning about classes in JavaScript will basically be told “here’s how classes work …but don’t look too closely.”

Now if you believe that outcomes matter more than understanding, then this is a perfectly acceptable trade-off. After all, we use computers every day without needing to understand the inner workings of every single piece of code under the hood.

It doesn’t sit well with me, though. I think that understanding how something works is important (in most cases). That’s why I favour learning underlying technologies first—HTML, CSS, JavaScript—before reaching for abstractions like frameworks and libraries. If you understand the way things work first, then your choice of framework, library, or any other abstraction is an informed choice.

The most common way that people refer to the new class syntax in JavaScript is to describe it as syntactical sugar. In other words, it doesn’t fundamentally introduce anything new under the hood, but it gives you a shorter, cleaner, nicer way of dealing with objects. It’s an abstraction. But because it’s an abstraction taken from other programming languages that work differently to JavaScript, it’s a bit of fudge. It’s a little white lie. The class keyword in JavaScript will work just fine as long as you don’t try to understand it.

My personal opinion is that this isn’t healthy.

I’ve come across two fantastic orators who cemented this view in my mind. At Render Conf in Oxford earlier this year, I had the great pleasure of hearing Ashley Williams talk about the challenges of teaching JavaScript. Skip to the 15 minute mark to hear her introduce the issues thrown up classes in JavaScript.

More recently, the mighty Kyle Simpson was on an episode of the JavaScript Jabber podcast. Skip to the 17 minute mark to hear him talk about classes in JavaScript.

(Full disclosure: Kyle also some very kind things about some of my blog posts at the end of that episode, but you can switch it off before it gets to that bit.)

Both Ashley and Kyle bring a much-needed perspective to the discussion of language design. That perspective is the perspective of a teacher.

In his essay on W3C’s design principles, Bert Bos lists learnability among the fundamental driving forces (closely tied to readability). Learnability and teachability are two sides of the same coin, and I find it valuable to examine any language decisions through that lens. With that mind, introducing a new feature into a language that comes with such low teachability value as to warrant a teacher actively telling a student not to learn how things really work …well, that just doesn’t seem right.

When I’m grilling outside, I cook on a gas barbecue. There are quite a few people who would take issue with this. Charcoal is clearly better, they claim. And they’re right. But the thing is, I can fire up my gas barbecue quickly and just get down to cooking.

When I’m programming on the server, I code in PHP. There are quite a few people who would take issue with this. Any other language is clearly better, they claim. And they’re right. But the thing is, I can fire up my text editor quickly and just get down to coding.

I was chatting with some people recently about “enterprise software”, trying to figure out exactly what that phrase means (assuming it isn’t referring to the LCARS operating system favoured by the United Federation of Planets). I always thought of enterprise software as “big, bloated and buggy,” but those are properties of the software rather than a definition.

The more we discussed it, the clearer it became that the defining attribute of enterprise software is that it’s software you never chose to use: someone else in your organisation chose it for you. So the people choosing the software and the people using the software could be entirely different groups.

That old adage “No one ever got fired for buying IBM” is the epitome of the world of enterprise software: it’s about risk-aversion, and it doesn’t necessarily prioritise the interests of the end user (although it doesn’t have to be that way).

In his critique of AngularJS PPK points to an article discussing the framework’s suitability for enterprise software and says:

Angular is aimed at large enterprise IT back-enders and managers who are confused by JavaScript’s insane proliferation of tools.

My own anecdotal experience suggests that Angular is not only suitable for enterprise software, but—assuming the definition provided above—Angular is enterprise software. In other words, the people deciding that something should be built in Angular are not necessarily the same people who will be doing the actual building.

Like I said, this is just anecdotal, but it’s happened more than once that a potential client has approached Clearleft about a project, and made it clear that they’re going to be building it in Angular. Now, to me, that seems weird: making a technical decision about what front-end technologies you’ll be using before even figuring out what your website needs to do.

Ah, but there’s the rub! It’s only weird if you think of Angular as a front-end technology. The idea of choosing a back-end technology (PHP, Ruby, Python, whatever) before knowing what your website needs to do doesn’t seem nearly as weird to me—it shouldn’t matter in the least what programming language is running on the server. But Angular is a front-end technology, right? I mean, it’s written in JavaScript and it’s executed inside web browsers. (By the way, when I say “Angular”, I’m using it as shorthand for “Angular and its ilk”—this applies to pretty much all the monolithic JavaScript MVC frameworks out there.)

Well, yes, technically Angular is a front-end framework, but conceptually and philosophically it’s much more like a back-end framework (actually, I think it’s conceptually closest to a native SDK; something more akin to writing iOS or Android apps, while others compare it to ASP.NET). That’s what PPK is getting at in his follow-up post, Front end and back end. In fact, one of the rebuttals to PPKs original post basically makes the exactly same point as PPK was making: Angular is for making (possibly enterprise) applications that happen to be on the web, but are not of the web.

On the web, but not of the web. I’m well aware of how vague and hand-wavey that sounds so I’d better explain what I mean by that.

The way I see it, the web is more than just a set of protocols and agreements—HTTP, URLs, HTML. It’s also built with a set of principles that—much like the principles underlying the internet itself—are founded on ideas of universality and accessibility. “Universal access” is a pretty good rallying cry for the web. Now, the great thing about the technologies we use to build websites—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—is that universal access doesn’t have to mean that everyone gets the same experience.

Yes, like a broken record, I am once again talking about progressive enhancement. But honestly, that’s because it maps so closely to the strengths of the web: you start off by providing a service, using the simplest of technologies, that’s available to anyone capable of accessing the internet. Then you layer on all the latest and greatest browser technologies to make the best possible experience for the most number of people. But crucially, if any of those enhancements aren’t available to someone, that’s okay; they can still accomplish the core tasks.

So that’s one view of the web. It’s a view of the web that I share with other front-end developers with a background in web standards.

There’s another way of viewing the web. You can treat the web as a delivery mechanism. It is a very, very powerful delivery mechanism, especially if you compare it to alternatives like CD-ROMs, USB sticks, and app stores. As long as someone has the URL of your product, and they have a browser that matches the minimum requirements, they can have instant access to the latest version of your software.

That’s pretty amazing, but the snag for me is that bit about having a browser that matches the minimum requirements. For me, that clashes with the universality that lies at the heart of the World Wide Web. Sites built in this way are on the web, but are not of the web.

This isn’t anything new. If you think about it, sites that used the Flash plug-in to deliver their experience were on the web, but not of the web. They were using the web as a delivery mechanism, but they weren’t making use of the capabilities of the web for universal access. As long as you have the Flash plug-in, you get 100% of the intended experience. If you don’t have the plug-in, you get 0% of the intended experience. The modern equivalent is using a monolithic JavaScript library like Angular. As longer as your browser (and network) fulfils the minimum requirements, you should get 100% of the experience. But if your browser falls short, you get nothing. In other words, Angular and its ilk treat the web as a platform, not a continuum.

If you’re coming from a programming environment where you have a very good idea of what the runtime environment will be (e.g. a native app, a server-side script) then this idea of having minimum requirements for the runtime environment makes total sense. But, for me, it doesn’t match up well with the web, because the web is accessed by web browsers. Plural.

It’s telling that we’ve fallen into the trap of talking about what “the browser” is capable of, as though it were indeed a single runtime environment. There is no single “browser”, there are multiple, varied, hostile browsers, with differing degrees of support for front-end technologies …and that’s okay. The web was ever thus, and despite the wishes of some people that we only code for a single rendering engine, the web will—I hope—always have this level of diversity and competition when it comes to web browsers (call it fragmentation if you like). I not only accept that the web is this messy, chaotic place that will be accessed by a multitude of devices, I positively welcome it!

The alternative is to play a game of “let’s pretend”: Let’s pretend that web browsers can be treated like a single runtime environment; Let’s pretend that everyone is using a capable browser on a powerful device.

The problem with playing this game of “let’s pretend” is that we’ve played it before and it never works out well: Let’s pretend that everyone has a broadband connection; Let’s pretend that everyone has a screen that’s at least 960 pixels wide.

I refused to play that game in the past and I still refuse to play it today. I’d much rather live with the uncomfortable truth of a fragmented, diverse landscape of web browsers than live with a comfortable delusion.

The alternative—to treat “the browser” as though it were a known quantity—reminds of the punchline to all those physics jokes that go “Assume a perfectly spherical cow…”

Monolithic JavaScript frameworks like Angular assume a perfectly spherical browser.

If you’re willing to accept that assumption—and say to hell with the 250,000,000 people using Opera Mini (to pick just one example)—then Angular is a very powerful tool for helping you build something that is on the web, but not of the web.

Now I’m not saying that this way of building is wrong, just that it is at odds with my own principles. That’s why Angular isn’t necessarily a bad tool, but it’s a bad tool for me.

We often talk about opinionated software, but the truth is that all software is opinionated, because all software is built by humans, and humans can’t help but imbue their beliefs and biases into what they build (Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web being a good example of that).

Software, like all technologies, is inherently political. … Code inevitably reflects the choices, biases and desires of its creators.

When it comes to choosing software that’s supposed to help you work faster—a JavaScript framework, for example—there are many questions you can ask: Is the code well-written? How big is the file size? What’s the browser support? Is there an active community maintaining it? But all of those questions are secondary to the most important question of all, which is “Do the beliefs and assumptions of this software match my own beliefs and assumptions?”

If the answer to that question is “yes”, then the software will help you. But if the answer is “no”, then you will be constantly butting heads with the software. At that point it’s no longer a useful tool for you. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad tool, just that it’s not a good fit for your needs.

That’s the reason why you can have one group of developers loudly proclaiming that a particular framework “rocks!” and another group proclaiming equally loudly that it “sucks!”. Neither group is right …and neither group is wrong. It comes down to how well the assumptions of that framework match your own worldview.

Now when it comes to a big MVC JavaScript framework like Angular, this issue is hugely magnified because the software is based on such a huge assumption: a perfectly spherical browser. This is exemplified by the architectural decision to do client-side rendering with client-side templates (as opposed to doing server-side rendering with server-side templates, also known as serving websites). You could try to debate the finer points of which is faster or more efficient, but it’s kind of like trying to have a debate between an atheist and a creationist about the finer points of biology—the fundamental assumptions of both parties are so far apart that it makes a rational discussion nigh-on impossible.

(Incidentally, Brett Slatkin ran the numbers to compare the speed of client-side vs. server-side rendering. His methodology is very telling: he tested in Chrome and …another Chrome. “The browser” indeed.)

So …depending on the way you view the web—“universal access” or “delivery mechanism”—Angular is either of no use to you, or is an immensely powerful tool. It’s entirely subjective.

But the problem is that if Angular is indeed enterprise software—i.e. somebody else is making the decision about whether or not you will be using it—then you could end up in a situation where you are forced to use a tool that not only doesn’t align with your principles, but is completely opposed to them. That’s a nightmare scenario.

The front page of today’s Guardian ran with a story on Binyam Mohamed and his fight to stop evidence of his torture from being destroyed:

The photograph will be destroyed within 30 days of his case being dismissed by the American courts — a decision on which is due to be taken by a judge imminently, Clive Stafford Smith, Mohamed’s British lawyer and director of Reprieve, the legal charity, said today.

Reprieve recently relaunched their website and they chose Clearleft to help them. I was responsible for the front-end build; that’s my usual role. But unusually, I also had to build a CMS.

We don’t normally do back-end work at Clearleft. That’s a conscious decision; we don’t want to tie ourselves to any particular server-side language. Usually we partner up with server-side developers; either those of the client or independent agencies like New Bamboo. In the case of Reprieve, the budget didn’t allow for that option. We were faced with three possibilities:

1. Write a CMS from scratch, probably using PHP and MySQL—the technologies I’m most comfortable with.
2. Take an off-the-shelf platform like WordPress or Expression Engine and twist it to make it fit the needs of the client.
3. Create a CMS using Django which would give us an admin interface for free.

There was a three person team responsible for the project: myself, Cennydd and Paul. We did a little card-sorting exercise, weighing up the pros and cons of each option. Django came out on top.

I had conflicting emotions about this. On the one hand, I was pleased to have the chance to learn a new technology. On the other hand, I was absolutely terrified that I would be completely out of my depth.

I had seen Simon giving a talk on Django just a few weeks previously. I stuck my hand up during the Q and A to ask Is it possible to learn Django without first learning Python? Simon said that a year ago, he would have said No. But given the work of fellow designers like Jeff and Bryan, the answer isn’t so clear cut. Maybe Django could be a really good introduction to Python.

By far the hardest part of building a Django website was the initial set-up. Sure, installing Django was pretty straightforward …once you’ve made sure you’ve installed the right image libraries, the right database bindings, blah, blah, blah. I can deal with programming challenges but I have no desire to become a sysadmin. Setting up my local dev environment on my Mac was a hair-tearing experience. Setting up the live environment, even on a Django-friendly host like WebFaction, was almost as frustrating …no thanks to the worst. screencast. EVER.

But I persevered, I obediently followed the tutorial, and I discovered all the things that make Django such a powerful framework; the excellent separation of concerns, the superb templating system, the lack of so-called front-end “helpers” that cripple other server-side frameworks. I think Gareth was really onto something when he noticed the way that the web standards world appears to be choosing Django.

In the end, Django proved to be absolutely the right choice for Reprieve. It provided enough flexibility for me to build a site tailored to the specific needs of the client while at the same time, giving me plenty of pre-built tools like RSS and, crucially, the admin interface. The client is extremely happy with the power that the admin interface offers.

For my part, it was an honour to work on a project with this mission statement:

We investigate, we litigate and we educate, working on the frontline, providing legal support to prisoners unable to pay for it themselves. We promote the rule of law around the world, and secure each person’s right to a fair trial. And in doing so, we save lives.