I've been writing UX code professionally since the late 90's and for many years, I have led teams that build relatively complex UX software products at companies you've surely heard of.
It took me about about 5 years before I began to realize no one I had met, had any idea how to do this work in a way that wasn't horrible.
I held out hope, and thought maybe those other super-smarty-pants folks over there had it all figured out.
It took another 10 years to figure out that they most definitely did not have anything figured out at all. Functional weanies, OO nerds, Imperative Prima donnas. No one. Has GUI figured out. Not Apple, Not MS, Not Linux. No One.
I've worked professionally in every language, every framework, every paradigm. I've tried it all.
Writing Graphical User Interfaces is HARD.
The problem is that the problem is HARD.
Graphical User Interfaces (for anything reasonably sophisticated) represent broad and deep, hierarchical, tree-like (or graph-like) projections of large amounts of ___domain information PLUS some amount of administrative debris.
Changing any state of any node in these large and complex data structures can and often should cause some other node in some faraway sub-branch to instantaneously be updated.
Sometimes, that node is on someone else's computer. Almost always, there's a replicated, similar, but different version of that information on a server somewhere that really must be kept in sync.
The problem is made exponentially more complex when we just drop in some little multi-user, real-time update stories.
This thread is a great example of people shitting on the whole field, and yet... Not one person has figured out how to make front-end development not suck.
The problem appears to be deceptively simple on the surface, and like those sirens, it calls out to weary sailors, only to leave them shipwrecked on the shore.
Funny enough, it turns out that Text-based User Interfaces (TUI's) are far more expressive and exponentially easier to author and maintain.
They just have the little, teeny problem of being a sheer cliff face that users must ascend in order to get anything useful at all.
It's my bet, that the world will be saved by some mixture of Text and Graphical UX that is primarily rooted in Text, but enhanced by graphics, rather than the other way around.
This whole LLM thing looks kind of interesting on that front.
I suspect we'll all look back on the last 30 years with contempt and remorse at all the wasted time and energy we've put into this mess that we've created that is called, "Graphical Applications."
Feel free to rant on about how shitty everything is, but just remember that at least one person out here in the ether knows that your solution either doesn't exist (most likely) or is even worse.
I'm a designer but 80% of the time I implement user interfaces. I have to say that the worst user interface code comes from traditionally educated computer science people... it's almost always a huge pile of shit with layer upon layer of useless abstraction.
I think you're right... no one has it figured out, it's all a mess.
It took me about about 5 years before I began to realize no one I had met, had any idea how to do this work in a way that wasn't horrible.
I held out hope, and thought maybe those other super-smarty-pants folks over there had it all figured out.
It took another 10 years to figure out that they most definitely did not have anything figured out at all. Functional weanies, OO nerds, Imperative Prima donnas. No one. Has GUI figured out. Not Apple, Not MS, Not Linux. No One.
I've worked professionally in every language, every framework, every paradigm. I've tried it all.
Writing Graphical User Interfaces is HARD.
The problem is that the problem is HARD.
Graphical User Interfaces (for anything reasonably sophisticated) represent broad and deep, hierarchical, tree-like (or graph-like) projections of large amounts of ___domain information PLUS some amount of administrative debris.
Changing any state of any node in these large and complex data structures can and often should cause some other node in some faraway sub-branch to instantaneously be updated.
Sometimes, that node is on someone else's computer. Almost always, there's a replicated, similar, but different version of that information on a server somewhere that really must be kept in sync.
The problem is made exponentially more complex when we just drop in some little multi-user, real-time update stories.
This thread is a great example of people shitting on the whole field, and yet... Not one person has figured out how to make front-end development not suck.
The problem appears to be deceptively simple on the surface, and like those sirens, it calls out to weary sailors, only to leave them shipwrecked on the shore.
Funny enough, it turns out that Text-based User Interfaces (TUI's) are far more expressive and exponentially easier to author and maintain.
They just have the little, teeny problem of being a sheer cliff face that users must ascend in order to get anything useful at all.
It's my bet, that the world will be saved by some mixture of Text and Graphical UX that is primarily rooted in Text, but enhanced by graphics, rather than the other way around.
This whole LLM thing looks kind of interesting on that front.
I suspect we'll all look back on the last 30 years with contempt and remorse at all the wasted time and energy we've put into this mess that we've created that is called, "Graphical Applications."
Feel free to rant on about how shitty everything is, but just remember that at least one person out here in the ether knows that your solution either doesn't exist (most likely) or is even worse.