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Is the madness ever going to end?

unixsheikh.com

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#51
post #18

It will end when people like the author drop their victim mentality and start putting their own ideas into practice. It seems that this person is content with yelling on the sidelines about how good and efficient things used to be. Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why? "The situation is really bad for…

There are also great projects like Hotwire that are gaining momentum that seek to actually address some of these problems of never ending layers of complexity. I think more constructive posts advocating for things like that would be more productive than the 1 millionth "SPAs are too complicated" blog post.

Most of these solutions that the author complains about came about to solve real problems, and without addressing how we can continue to solve those real problems with a simpler set of solutions, it's really just noise.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#52
post #18

It will end when people like the author drop their victim mentality and start putting their own ideas into practice. It seems that this person is content with yelling on the sidelines about how good and efficient things used to be. Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why? "The situation is really bad for…

> Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why?

The funny thing is, 20 years ago the same arguments were being made.

"Windows MFC is a nightmare to write against!"

"X11 is terrible, why are we using it?"

"Everything we write is built on so many abstractions developers don't know what they are doing."

"VB6 is dumbing down development"

"Developers writing in Java don't understand what is really going on."

"Java is too slow!"

OK the last one was true. UIs in Java were obscenely memory intensive relative to computers back when Java was first introduced.

But yeah, more things change, the more the complaints stay the same.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#55

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…

I’m very critical when a company like Slack cannot find the time and resources to make native clients. I’m so #%^*ing tired of it taking three Mississippis to show a channel I click on.

But on the whole, I don’t think the armchair critics truly appreciate how Electron reduces the cost by at least an order of magnitude. It’s a brilliant tool for shipping early and fast. My only criticism with these start-up use cases is that these Electron apps can often just be websites.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#56
> has no value over a native desktop application what so ever - well, perhaps with the only exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse.

This is huge when it comes to time to market and leveraging existing code and skills. Who are the people who are even learning native desktop anything anymore? It is hard enough to find developers. Now go find people who know/are willing to learn that.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#57
>Programming is engineering, it's not something where you throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks and just assume that programming languages, browsers and operating systems are made of magical dust.

News to me. I've built an entire software career around throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#58
> Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry?

everyone wants to prove themselves by having s gh project that is used by a lot of people. So solutions start searching for problems...

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#59
There are a few factors that led to this situation.

- Moore's law and the free ride of software during a few decades

- The difficulty of doing text rendering and UI properly on several platforms

- New generations of programmers being proficient with the tools they used to learn, favor using them as long at it works

The free ride is mostly over, this is a good thing, I am not sure if this is too late or not.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#60
post #15

> and while we're add it I hole-hardedly agree, but allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies...

Don't think I realized there was an idiom about morels. Thanks for that
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