Why are homepage examples too complicated?

Benjiro via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Oct 21 16:08:06 PDT 2016


On Thursday, 20 October 2016 at 09:10:10 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I.e. "He agrees with me, therefore I like him!" One year of 
> meetings to design a website does not necessarily mean the 
> site's good or that it has to take at least a year until you 
> have a presentable website.

Sorry, was too busy with some darn project to respond. Been 
rewriting from zero some custom webshop system that guys in 
Poland wrote ( horrible bugs, bloated and just nasty ). Ended up 
writing a metadata/json structure linked to a entry commit 
system. Yay ... 15 tables to 3, mysql queries down to 1/10 etc... 
Already 5 times as fast and its not even optimized. *sigh*

So tired seeing entry level PHP code. Guess why i am interested 
in learning D. I need a break and move to something better *lol*.

> Designing a website for a company means that the marketing 
> knobs feel they have to throw in their 2 cents and want them 
> acted upon or they block the whole process - then at the end, 
> all of a sudden the boss - who never cared for the website - 
> wants to have a look too and here we go again...

> We're talking about font-sizes, gradient colors, button 2px to 
> the left, company logo bigger/smaller etc, not about the page 
> logic. Of course, because they know nothing about programming 
> they go by what they see and try to make a contribution there, 
> just for the sake of it.

No kidding ... bosses need to keep there hands out of projects. 
They are in general more trouble then they are worth. *lol*

We just lost 2 months on a project, because the bosses had the 
brilliant idea to outsource and started pitching / pushing it. 
And the whole discussion dragged on preventing us from starting 
on a major project ( why start on something that may be done by 
somebody else? ).

O, that webshop that now needs a rewrite from zero, was a direct 
result of another outsource. Yay! And the client ends up paying ( 
again ) for that.


Some projects simply take time. That whole travel site was indeed 
slow but the end result is definitely not bad. But, like you 
said, sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen slows things down. 
My and my college have rewritten several disaster projects, 
mostly in 3 to 4 months time per project. The reason we are fast 
is because we are in sync and the bosses stayed mostly out of the 
rewrite projects. We do it our way ( finally ) and the end 
results speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, bosses are bosses. Two senior PHP developers cost 
money ( hell, we are cheap, under payed ). They can never stop 
looking for money, while they trow money out of the door in one 
after another foolish scheme. Technically we are keeping the 
company afloat. *sigh*

> Unfortunately, it is often forgotten that each website needs a 
> different, unique approach. Getting inspiration from other 
> websites is good, trying to copy them is not a good idea, 
> because it will never serve your purpose optimally.

Yep ...

> The real craftsmanship behind a website is mastering the 
> various technologies that don't work smoothly together (HTML, 
> JS, PHP, forms, requests, server side stuff, browsers, data 
> bases). Web design is 90% page logic, 10% inspiration.

On this i kind of disagree. I can handle all the web techs with 
ease but you need people who can see things more in graphical / 
marketing / ease of use sense. We developers see a lot of times 
too much from our perspective.

Its the same reason why i mentioned the whole examples on the 
front page. While i had more then one reason to skip D, the 
mentioned example was one of them. When people have choices, they 
make them very fast.

Ali for instance, did a great job on his book. Its easy to get 
into, maybe a bit redundant from a more experience developers 
point of view but you quickly see the small details. Things you 
will simply look over without realizing.

Stupid and simple example that will make every developer here 
think: "this Benjiro guy is stupid". *haha*

Most example's simply show something like:

writefln("The minimum of %s is %d", test, min);

But what if you simply want to join two lines together. In PHP 
you do:

print('Hello' . 'World');

Try that in D. Does not work with dot. You need to use comma's. 
Comma's in PHP is a instant parse error. While the dots are a 
compile error in D.

writeln('Hello', 'World').

Yea ... sounds stupid but its those details that get lost in the 
flood of data. Don't overthink the whole "why do you want to 
merge Hello World", its just a silly example.

How about ~ for merging? That is also very fast overlooked. I 
know it sounds ridiculous but frankly, i do not have a lot of 
time so i try to learn on the fly. But its annoying getting 
hampered by those small details when your trying some code, until 
you finally figure it out.

Yes, its great that D has pipelines, template, alias, fibers etc 
but those are already more advanced concepts. Something so simple 
as the whole comma or merge syntax, does not even get mentioned 
in the Learn section ( not that i found ).

I found it in Ali's book but try finding me a few D newbies that 
invest into buying a book or find Ali's website. It takes a while 
to search the website and figure even the basic resource out. And 
in the one spot you expect to see this, its not even mentioned.

Maybe i am too much the spoilsport here but with limited amount 
of time, those small things quickly frustrate. Because i am 
already committed, i am willing to invest the limited time i 
have. Not all people will do that.

The Learn corner is good for people with experience. But its 
still lacking in details. Maybe Ali can take a look at expanding 
it? Or maybe make Ali's book like a "newbie" learn? :)

Its a bit long with 700+ pages but i do not know a single 
language website that has such a expanded tutorial *lol*

Just my 2 cents. Its late and i am tired.


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