441–450 of 467 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is disingenuous - he's obviously referring to image and text articles, not complicated web apps. Obviously such a website is going to take longer to load, just as complex native applications take a while to load. But to claim that because Word takes a while that it's okay that A WEBSITE WITH LITERALLY JUST TEXT AND IMAGES is 18 megs big and takes 6000 ms to load is fucking stupid.
Also, Word takes a while to load , but then works fast and is responsive - as well-written native apps are by default - and doesn't suck up your system resources. Something which can't be said about many websites "with literally just text and images".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you know C++/Perl/PHP but don't know ES6, websockets, Node, etc, would you not say that your opinion about the web being a bad environment for rich applications might be in some way colored by your personal economic interests? A common defensive mechanism among people with outdated skills is to try to delegitimize new frameworks and technologies in the hopes of convincing the broader community not to use things th…
I know C++, used to know Perl, and know JavaScript pretty well. The fact that you actually name WebSockets as a technology sort of sums up the issue we are discussing here. WebSockets is not something that can be compared to C++ or even Node. It's a dumb hack which justifies its existence primarily by allowing web apps to circumvent corporate firewall policies. The web is a joke of an app platform. Those of us who ha…
I would be interested in a detailed explanation of why websockets are a "dumb hack." Duplex streams much more closely map to what web apps actually need to do than dealing with an HTTP request-response cycle. In what way is streaming a hack and making requests that were originally designed to serve up new pages not a hack?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion. The recent cross-communication between JavaScript, Elm, and Clojure has been incredibly fruitful but hasn't been noticed by the bitter die-hards. And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp communi…
> Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion. This did not happen thanks to Unix; if anything, you'd probably have to be grateful to Microsoft and Apple for introducing OSes that were end-user-usable. There's a reason the "year of Linux on Desktop" never happened and is always one year fr…
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...
This is Steve Yegge's understanding of the Lisp community, and I should clarify that I don't think the XML monstrosities we all work with are "all their fault", but that, on the whole, the Lisp community and enterprise coders were mutually antagonistic.
Javascript after ES3 really wasn't broken at all, just most people coding in it didn't know how to take advantage of it. No language can prevent someone dedicated to bad code architecture from writing bad code. A Lisp programmer would've found a lot of comfortable features and powerful patterns and been able to share them, but most of their efforts were wasted denouncing everyone outside of their tiny sect. The end result was that most people learning JavaScript were taught how to code like it was broken Java because most of the resources were written by Enterprise Java devs who didn't understand what a fundamentally impoverished language Java is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion. This did not happen thanks to Unix; if anything, you'd probably have to be grateful to Microsoft and Apple for introducing OSes that were end-user-usable. There's a reason the "year of Linux on Desktop" never happened and is always one year fr…
Unix isn't for end users, it's for developers to build on top of to give things to end users. Linux on desktop already happened years and years ago if you work for a tech company, and that's probably about as far as it needs to go. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab... This is Steve Yegge's understanding of the Lisp community, and I should clarify that I don't think the XML monstrosities we…
Also, the influx of enterprise patterns into JavaScript is quite a recent phenomenon - personally, I blame Google (who, for a reason I can't understand to this day, embraces enterprise-level Java as their primary platform for everything...), but regardless, the problem with JavaScript culture is mostly that of very fast growth coupled with lack of experience and (probably unwilling) ignorance of the past. Since this community basically controls the Internet, it's hard for voices expressing some restraint and thoughtfulness to get trough the noise.
And I really do recommend The Unix-Haters Handbook. Funny thing is - over a decade ago, when I was acquainting myself with the Linux world (after many years of DOS and Windows experience), I've been noticing and complaining about various things that felt wrong or even asinine. Gradually I got convinced by people I considered smarter than me that those things are not bugs but features, they're how a Good Operating System works, etc. Only now I realize that my intuition back then was right, but I got Stockolm-syndromed to accept the insanity. Like most of the world. The sad thing is, there were better solutions in the past, which once again shows how IT is probably the only industry that's totally ignorant of its own history and constantly running in circles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a more radical departure is needed. It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages." Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There's way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, th…
I disagree. This is a backward-looking argument which ignores the unique benefits of the web which made it inevitable that it would evolve into an application platform, regardless of how tortured the results may feel. The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment. It is not controlled by a single vendor, and anyone implementing a new computing device must support the web (just stop for a second an…
So, were can I play Doom in the browser?
Here: http://playdosgamesonline.com/doom-ii-hell-on-earth.html (yes, it's Doom 2, and yes it requires a fast machine since it emulates a DOS PC in the browser)
1) Can we say the claim (I think of mozilla's) that the web was going to be the new OS is true?
2) If DOS today, will it be 5 or 10 years before we get BSD or *nix in the browser?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a more radical departure is needed. It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages." Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There's way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, th…
Isn't WebAssembly a big step towards this?
I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc. Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculat…