I get the sentiment. I understand the problem. The amount of disjointed tools that need to be strung together to build the proverbial todo list in the modern web ecosystem is beyond ridiculous. So much so that most of the people at my company seem to be spending most of their time adopting tools rather than building software.
What I quibble with is your solution. This is another layer on this cake of complexity that tries to hide the ugliness beneath rather than truly simplify. This sort of wrapping is rarely successful because eventually one of the underlying bits refuses to do its thing just as you’d hope and the house of cards comes tumbling down.
I don’t think the crappiness of the cloud and webdev “stacks” can be rectified without a do over. I think it may need a rethink from the OS all the way up. Maybe right down to the hardware layer.
I don’t think what’s there now is salvageable if we are hoping for a true shift in productivity.
I get where you are coming from! It does feel like that sometimes when building Wasp - a lot of technologies we are layering on top of, sometimes we need to let them leek out, sometimes we want to hide them, and sometimes we have to play around them - it is a lot of work to put all that together to play nicely, and it will never stop shifting, even if we "make it" it is always going to be constant effort keeping up.
On the other hand, I can't imagine tackling this in another way. Designing a web app is not complex for no reason - it is complex because web apps are complex. They are multi-user systems that work over distributed architecture, that need to maintain persistent state, look good, be scalable, be fast, work on all kinds of different browsers/devices/screens, be secure, ... . When you also add all the innovation that is happening in the current system, the idea of build a bespoke solution from the ground up sounds next to impossibly hard. Even Wasp sometimes feels impossibly hard to do, and it is still of much smaller scope than completely bespoke solution.
I would love to hear your ideas on this though - I certainly haven't been thinking a lot in this direction, merely due to discarding it upfront as a possible approach.
Btw, one thing that Wasp does in alignment with your idea of bespoke solution, is that it brings DSL that is in big part detached from the technology used for the implementation of the specific parts (JS/React/Node/...), meaning that if we get it working with existing technologies, we have one foot on the solid ground and can work from there to see which other, "smaller" problems can be tackled next, potentially ending up with a set of solutions that together create one new, bigger, bespoke solution.
I don't have solidified idea for reinventing web dev but I'm oscillating between two opposing strategies. One would be to have a micro app server in hardware - think RPi nano or even less, where each http session gets a dedicated "box" thus returning to the model of development that reduces everything to a single user, single process system. Persistence becomes a challenge. Ideally it would be a truly shared hardware component or alternatively it would be a swarm of tiny disks that can be queried independently and in aggregate.
The opposite idea would be to build a single OS on top of distributed hardware that presents resources in a truly unified fashion where the illusion of programming and deploying to a single machine is unbroken and none of the underlying abstractions leak up. Think VMware but in reverse.
The other thing that must be done over is the DOM/JS paradigm. It's so absurdly and ridiculously complex for what it does that it makes most developers laughable unproductive. There is no reason there couldn't be an environment like Delphi or VB but geared to the web developer. Wasm is a ray of hope here as its cutting loose the inane JS/DOM paradigm and finally offering a plain programmable canvas to the browser for the first time since the demise of Flash an Java applets before it.
The idea of single OS sounds great! Sounds like the future of the Cloud.
DOM/JS -> I think it now mostly came down to the paradigm of reactive programming, with React / Vue / Svelte.
What about Delphi and VB, what was so good about them?
it was easy to reason about. It was basically a canvas and UI components wired with callbacks. It didn't have the state management stuff of Redux but it was dead simple to reason about anyway despite everyone rolling out their own "state" objects.
But the whole idea of mutating UI by changing the DOM via a script is a pile of needless complexity for 99% of the apps out there. A simple canvas with GUI components that fire callbacks would be way easier for most developers to work with.
What I quibble with is your solution. This is another layer on this cake of complexity that tries to hide the ugliness beneath rather than truly simplify. This sort of wrapping is rarely successful because eventually one of the underlying bits refuses to do its thing just as you’d hope and the house of cards comes tumbling down.
I don’t think the crappiness of the cloud and webdev “stacks” can be rectified without a do over. I think it may need a rethink from the OS all the way up. Maybe right down to the hardware layer.
I don’t think what’s there now is salvageable if we are hoping for a true shift in productivity.