Ever get the feeling that modern web dev has become… a bit too complex?
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the “good old days”. When you could just write some code, compile it, and run it without worrying about all the dependencies, the build tools, the client-side rendering, the server-side rendering, the server components, and all the other buzzwords that are thrown around in the web dev world… just code doing its thing.
And honestly, I think that feeling isn’t totally wrong. Maybe we can make things simpler, faster, more straightforward again.
So naturally… I decided to embrace the future by going back to the past: COBOL.
Here’s my (100% serious, definitely not questionable) migration story.
I know this is a joke but seriously: Modern Web development sucks!
You can always do pre-Modern web development. There’s nothing stopping you.
In fact, with the modern browsers, it’s better than ever.
If you just want to build a basic web page or roughly static document / form, then AI can see why it would feel like overkill.
But if you’re building a full featured application then modern web development is kind of glorious.
I’ll wait until modern web developers figure out how to do things without a bazillion dependencies that have new critical vulnerabilities every week and release backwards incompatible versions every month or so.
Also I don’t like shipping several MB of JavaScript to the user just for a fancy looking form.