Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Obvious and possible software innovations

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 157 posts

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#101

Post by raverbashing »

roca wrote: post #23

I only had to read the first few sentences of the first point to see that the author thinks problems are easy because they don't understand the difficulties. Parsing C function prototypes doesn't give you enough information to write safe language bindings. For example if you see "char* make_stuff(const char* param);", you don't know whether the memory pointed to by 'param' can be reused after the function call, or wh…

You're right.

Because C conflates pointers with arrays. It conflates giving an array to a function with giving a space for it to write because there's no difference (besides the 'in'/'out' keyword which I'm not even sure is official)

C is defective out of the box.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#102

Post by Aeolun »

Santosh83 wrote: post #51

> Engineers are a defeated tribe; it’s cheaper to hire an “AI” (Alien or Immigrant) slave to write the terraform or electron front end rather than paying clever engineers well enough to build themselves useful tooling to make them more productive and the world a better place. Offensive passage that subtly implies immigrants from the developing world are slavish (and dehumanising them as well, using the word alien), i…

> I'm astonished that hordes of people are still ready to sell their first born if they can get a citizenship amid such a culture of passive racism and superiority complex.

Can you imagine how bad it is where they come from?

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#103

Post by jtsiskin »

nixpulvis wrote: post #21
japhib wrote: post #9

I actually really dislike this whole post. There’s a really condescending tone lurking just beneath the surface for most of it. It’s also extremely hand-wavy about the problems, their causes, AND possible solutions. Also, so whiny. At this point I don’t care if he even has any good ideas because he’s made me so mad just by his writing style.

I don't find it whiney at all. I do agree it's a little condescending, and that it's got a bit of a rambling flow; from semi-technical to straight bitching, all the way around to political.

And randomly insults Lauren Sánchez’s appearance; seems like a weird thing to throw into an article about software..

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#105

Post by Aeolun »

andrewflnr wrote: post #41
speedgoose wrote: post #19

There are many reasons why developers use Electron for GUI development. The size of the final package is not very important, and creating many times the same native application is not that appealing. Having a cross platform, responsive, and a modern high quality framework is much more appealing.

> The size of the final package is not very important You can only install so many packages with this philosophy before size starts to be important after. More to the point, you can only run a few of them at a time, on machines with gigabytes of RAM. This is a profound embarrassment to our industry. If by "responsive" you're referring to input latency, Electron apps are at best on par with native, usually worse IME.…

I can start building in React today, and style literally everything without really thinking about it.

I can start with Qt5 today, and give up screaming in rage tomorrow because I can’t get my select dropdown to display what I want.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#106

Post by Aeolun »

pjc50 wrote: post #65
the_optimist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing in this quote which implies a hatred of women, and perhaps you inferring it says more about you than about the quote.

Did you miss the "lip filler Cthulhu"?

Well, yes, but it’s preceded by an equally flattering statement about Bezos himself.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#107

Post by Aeolun »

Every time I read something like this, I think how much I want a true cross platform GUI library with the customizability of HTML/CSS, determine to build it myself, then give up before I even start when I realize how much work it’s going to be.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#109

Post by ironmagma »

Aeolun wrote: post #99
ironmagma wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a ton of effective drag and drop GUI builders for HTML/CSS: Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, and Plasmic to name a few, and that's just the current generation (see also: Dreamweaver et al.). > Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today How? CSS and HTML can do practically everything frames could do (the only thing I can think of that doesn't apply is independent histories). There are a l…

Are those building a GUI? Or just a website? As far as I know they’re mostly about markup.

That's a strange distinction to make. Websites are a type of GUIs. You can build some pretty complicated things without JavaScript, but if you need JS, then yes, most of them support it in some form or another, Plasmic probably being the most sophisticated.
Post reply on HN