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Is the madness ever going to end?

unixsheikh.com

61–70 of 629 posts

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#61
I think this rant is going against the irrational outcomes of a few things

1. People tend to put excessive hope in silver bullets, quick fixes, and the easy path. "Discipline" is generally shied away from.

2. It's an attempt to save the more expensive thing (engineer time) for the cheaper thing (RAM) especially in the face of rapidly improving hardware (which may no longer be true).

3. As engineers become expensive, people who have little interest in the subject become sufficiently motivated to hit the minimum bar, bringing down the average talent/quality of the pool. I am daily shocked by the number of engineers that do not understand the differences between implementations, and how "good enough" for a single scenario is not "good enough" for a complex and unpredictable future. Your 1 month implementation may be "faster" on paper, but if we consider the implementation time until yours and mine have acceptable robustness under duress, acceptable bug counts, predictable outcomes in unpredictable scenarios then my 6 month implementation will beat your "requires rewrite" (quarterly) by years... But never mind that, the engineer with the crap impl will "save" the company $100K a month in opex when he cuts the inefficiency in half and be promoted to architect. Meanwhile the engineer that does an efficient impl, maybe slightly over schedule will languish because there isn't even a 10% gain to be had, or the thing runs so stably the project is entirely forgotten about for years (because it just works) ...

So yeah, Electron is what we get when we pursue logical fallacies with little to no accountability for the true outcomes, and no rewards for excellence and subject mastery. Yup I'm a dinosaur too.

Anyways, I'm ranting now too...

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#62
Ultimately I kind of agree with the sentiment but the sensationalism here is cringe. Also, some new tools and languages are indeed worthy improvements. It's worth calling out the ones that aren't; lashing out at all new technology as a whole is not how you should come at this issue.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#63

I'm a greybeard. I've been doing this since before HTML existed, and I've kept up with the changes as they occurred along the way. I'm not going to refute the author's points one by one. Everything being complained about exists for a reason. I agree that it's incredibly complex. It's overwhelming. That's why people specialize. An individual can still own an entire application and infrastructure, limit their technolog…

I agree with your argument. The comment about blogs taking long to load leads me to believe most of these complaints are really only applicable to small scale projects. The massive stacks used for web development now are targeted at organizations that can scale into the hundreds or thousands of web developers with varying skills. In turn, when doing small scale work, most newer developers copy the massive enterprise stack, pay the price for the possibility of scaling (both requestwise and developerwise) without every really needing to.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#65
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?

Because in the time that OP spends tracking down segfaults and getting a dozen native libraries to compile for his native app, the JS dev has already finished XYZ feature. And because the environment is so high level, he can use the extra brain capacity for things like UX, business logic, and accessibility (things people actually care about) rather than meaningless implementation details.

This stuff won out for a reason. HTML/CSS/JS is literally a 10x improvement in iteration speed versus native.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#66
post #2

No it probably won't end. No you are not a dinosaur, but development has changed. Decades ago you could build an app from the ground up. This gave you a bunch of different layers to compose, and probably made the app overall simpler. Now most developers are given a box to create their feature in whether it's a Spring Bean, a React Component, or a serverless function, with an entire application stack under it. You cou…

That's a great perspective, but are those peeps writing the unused frameworks just wasting their time to solve a question nobody has asked? Take the D language, it's basically a poor man's Java, with a shoddy garbage collector and aspirations at being C/C++... Is that the work of heroes or the misguided?

> Is that the work of heroes or the misguided?

Precisely both, since no one agrees. At least money can be used as a fitness function sometimes, with games and not with enterprise. The idea is that if D were that much better people would make more money by choosing it over Java.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#67
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…

Yep. When I saw the tired "Electron = bad" rant I immediately went to look for a tab entitled "Projects" to see if the author had created a native desktop app with "value"[1] equal to or greater than what a good Electron app provides (Slack, Spotify, Discord, VS Code). But lo and behold, no such tab.

[1]: [Electron apps] constantly crash and has no value over a native desktop application what so ever

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#68
It's because most programming efforts are built on top of a predetermined stack. If that stack isn't a great fit for whatever reason, then your only alternative is to make another layer that is a better fit, even if that same level of abstraction exists lower in the stack.

Of course, you don't want to do that for every project, so there gets to be one common open source layer to serve that purpose. So now lots of people like the new layer and use it, and then it becomes prescribed for other developers. Then it's not a perfect fit for all those developers, and they start writing another layer to change it again. GOTO 10.

Another thing that happens is if you are used to working at layer N, then layer N-2 is really scary low level stuff. It's much more comfortable to write layer N+1 rather than step down to N-2. Even if N-2 is actually a lot simpler if you just lose the fear and try it.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#69
I am going to ask and duck. What is a seriously good cross platform (yes also web) [meaning windows, Linux, Mac, Android, ios, web] alternative to electron? I used haxe 2/3 (openfl), javafx, qt. No they are not even close.

Next thing what is bad about vscode? I really like this application as a prime example of perfect cross platform compatibility. It is also electron based. Just because 90% is shit (because it is fast, easy to use and most important to deploy) does not mean it's the libraries fault, right?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#70

"They constantly crash..." Putting aside the downsides and reasons not to use Electron, this statement is just false. They are not "constantly crashing." I currently use at least Figma, Insomnia, Slack, Spotify, and VS Code and these apps rarely crash, if ever.

It's possible that they crash constantly on that person's computer, especially if they have a bad power supply or other hardware. The problem might just be their own.

Dodgy stick of RAM maybe?

I'm not a fan of electron, heck, is go as far as to say I don't like it, but those statements are just unfair.

I run a bunch of electron apps on Linux every single day of the week for years now and I honestly can't say any of them have ever crashed.

Yes they may take up a bunch of RAM, but how many software engineers have less than about 16GB, and what's that RAM there for, if not too run my tools?

I can't say I've ever gotten over a few gigabytes of usage in a normal work day (not running any VMs for example). I don't use Chrome nor am I a tab-hoarder.

Whether I like electron itself or not, the told built in it seems to get the job I need done just fine. Who cares if it takes 3-4 second to open, once per day?

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