> We can't expect to turn back the clock and have everyone writing HTML by hand again, not when we're all accustomed to typing text and uploading media via carefully manicured, intentionally minimal user interfaces.

I mean, I do it. That was always allowed! You've been able to write as much or as little HTML as you want since the Web was invented.

Depends on the exact age, and how much your kid expects to be trolled.

I miss actually owning software that couldn't be rewritten or revoked at any given time.

Concur. It's an unfortunate race to the bottom which is just indicative of the dilution of ability in this godforsaken industry. Why can't a team of grunts manage a basic CRUD web app? That's what's so frustrating: most of these problems aren't even _hard_, and yet devs screw them up anyway.

Signed, a greybeard sick of cleaning up messes.

You don't necessarily get them at high pay grades, either. I know people making fat salaries who truly can't manage to write anything decent, it's all a big JS monstrosity with 500 MB of broken dependencies and six build tools that all jump major versions every eight weeks.

Salary has long since been disconnected from skill, ever since cheap money flooded the industry, and easier abstractions made it seem like "everyone can code". Perhaps "fog a mirror" shouldn't be the only programmer criterion.

That used to not be the case. Has something changed?

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

All magic comes with a price, and the inside of Mylar packaging is absolutely magic. That is, it seems like whenever we try to science our way out of some food mistake, we end up making it worse.

Don't get me wrong, science has kept a lot of people from starving (although heavy nitrogen fertilizer use and monocultures are a challenge for the environment), but after a certain point, we started losing gains in health because we started optimizing for profit.

Now, we put pictures of nature on ultraprocessed food and convince people it's good for them, when all they really need is to eat an apple, which, unfortunately, has no marketing department.

Humans are smart, but there is probably no magic bullet. The safest food packaging is the skin on an orange.

> all they really need is to eat an apple, which, unfortunately, has no marketing department.

I think you'll find that apples do have a marketing department: https://waapple.org/.

It sounds like your issue is with the syntax of Jinja, and the hellscape of HTML email. I'm not sure how 20 MB of inscrutable JavaScript would help, considering it's also just template rendering with extra steps (bonus: using the user's CPU cycles and power instead of your own).

> It sounds like your issue is with the syntax of Jinja, and the hellscape of HTML email. I'm not sure how 20 MB of inscrutable JavaScript would help, considering it's also just template rendering with extra steps

20MB of inscrutable JavaScript allows you to have a) a sane structured component system where you can actually build up UIs compositionally rather than a flat glorified string substituter (i.e. not actually "just template rendering"), and b) the control and abstractions needed to make good UIs out of nested tables.

you can compose UI on the backend without string substituting. Are you under the impress that JSX is some sort of thing exclusive to Frontend?

> you can compose UI on the backend without string substituting.

Sure, but you're still going to be using "20 MB of inscrutable JavaScript". (Unless you use Wicket, but I'm not sure that's an option for emails, and would likely trigger the same complaints anyway). I mean, I hope you're not using the component style rendering layer for Python that I published ~10 years ago, because I haven't maintained it, and as far as I know there aren't any others.

20 MB JavaScript is much less bad when you’re not sending it to the client.

And all this for marketing emails nobody reads anyway.

Your second paragraph disproves your first. Websites' needs didn't drastically increase (I'm ignoring nonsense like WebGPU; render graphics outside the web browser like a God-fearing Christian!), but their complexity did. Why? Well, we told everyone with a pulse they could make six figures "doing web development", and we're reaping what we've sown.

You can still design websites like it's 2005, and they'll be damn fast. But pitch something like MFC or even PHP to a 20-something frontend developer now and watch the blood drain from their face.

We don't build websites anymore, we build web apps

It make seem trite but you just aren't going to have a good time building some of the stuff people build now using a LAMP stack

"We" build both. You might be building WebApps, I certianly don't and so are countless others. The web is not one homogenous thing where everyone is doing the same thing at the same time.

Different people work on different projects serving different needs and we have to acknowledge that otherwise we end up in these silly tech-religious arguments where people think there's one and only one way to do things and that's certianly not the case.