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Poll: A year from now, which language will you be writing mobile apps in?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: A year from now, which language will you be writing mobile apps in?

#21

Post by daleharvey »

iloveponies wrote: post #15
daleharvey wrote: post #6

While native applications wont go away any time soon, I fully believe that we will see the exact same position as we do currently do with flash vs the web. People will use native apps particularly when web apps just cant provide the functionality needed, but web apps will grow into the large majority, slowly improving and eating out the market from the bottom. its taken the web a very long time to take out flash's ma…

I disagree. Native apps will not have to, unless they specifically introduce it, the overheads of a browser rendering engine and all that entails. Even after you make the rendering engine as efficient as possible both in software and in hardware engineering, the overheads will always be there no matter how good you get things. You really can only do so much on 3.7v. Personally, I'm looking into doing Qt development n…

I think any time you are saying X maybe ore convenient but it wont be as computationally efficient it becomes a matter of "when" not a matter of "if"

That being said I already spend the majority of my time using mobile optimised web sites / web apps and they havent had a noticeable effect on my battery vs native apps, so while I am making it a "prediction", its really already happened, I just think the trend will continue.

Re: Poll: A year from now, which language will you be writing mobile apps in?

#22

Post by frankus »

iloveponies wrote: post #15
daleharvey wrote: post #6

While native applications wont go away any time soon, I fully believe that we will see the exact same position as we do currently do with flash vs the web. People will use native apps particularly when web apps just cant provide the functionality needed, but web apps will grow into the large majority, slowly improving and eating out the market from the bottom. its taken the web a very long time to take out flash's ma…

I disagree. Native apps will not have to, unless they specifically introduce it, the overheads of a browser rendering engine and all that entails. Even after you make the rendering engine as efficient as possible both in software and in hardware engineering, the overheads will always be there no matter how good you get things. You really can only do so much on 3.7v. Personally, I'm looking into doing Qt development n…

At the risk of making this a "me too" comment, I want to expand on iloveponies answer.

Mobile is special, in that the answer to the question of "would less processor/memory/storage overhead be better?" is probably going to be "yes" for the foreseeable future. It certainly will for the next year.

This gives you a very different tradeoff between developer productivity and code efficiency than you would have on a desktop machine, much less in a server farm.

At some point batteries will be so good, and processors so efficient, and memory so cheap that the overhead of not running natively will go from "it doesn't matter except for some games and stuff" to "it doesn't matter". And compilers and development environments will be able to amp up developer productivity without sacrificing power efficiency. So daleharvey might get the last laugh. Just not next year.

Re: Poll: A year from now, which language will you be writing mobile apps in?

#23

Post by ElliotH »

hooeezit wrote: post #9

Python on Android would be my preferred option. But I've yet to look at Scala and Ruby, so if they become available on Android, I'd definitely try that. I have 3 android devices, but haven't gotten around to programming them because I hate Java.

ASE(http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-an...) Lets Ruby and Python run among others. It may not be ideal for distribution to end-users yet, but it seems pretty good.
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