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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?

#81

Post by meetups323 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #55
root_axis wrote: post #23

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…

Usually they are websites. That's kinda the whole point... Spotify's desktop app is the same as open.spotify.com, Discord's is the same as discord.com, VS Code's is the same as vscode.dev, Slack is the same as.. something. But yeah, instead of those companies all needing 5 separate engineering teams (Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and you're joking if you think they'll make a Linux native app), they just make a website. You're welcome to use the websites instead of the desktop apps for any of those, though you'll lose some OS integration capability.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#82

Post by datavirtue »

ramesh31 wrote: post #65
prions wrote: 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 thing…

It didn't win for that reason.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#83

Post by [deleted] »

prions wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#84

Post by hombre_fatal »

prions wrote: 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…

It’s refreshing to see this as the top comment on a forum where we are often guilty of this mentality.

I notice that this mentality isn’t as common in circles of people with their nose to the grindstone building things.

Right now I have some game modding Discord servers in mind where everyone has crappy tools but is focused on building things regardless, and complaining about the state of things just feels trite, as if the entire ecosystem is responding “Ok, in Utopia things are better, but what are you building today?”

For some reason people confuse sour grapes with some sort of high brow eureka they need to dump onto the world.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#85

Post by phailhaus »

I feel comfortable with asserting that the author has never worked on a complex web application. This web-dev hate borders on pathological: this is a guy that seems to specialize in Unix/Linux tooling, doesn't have a single tutorial on web app development [1], and yet has an intense hatred towards a space that he barely understands.

These types of arguments are incredibly embarrassing to read, not only because they betray a stunning lack of familiarity with the topic, but it's basically a conspiracy theory: everybody is stupid except me, all these successful companies making billions of dollars and attracting top talent are just throwing money into a fire for fun.

[1] https://unixsheikh.com/tutorials.html

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#86

Post by [deleted] »

Koshkin wrote: 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...

[deleted]

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#87

Post by tuatoru »

com2kid wrote: post #52
prions wrote: 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…

All of them are still true, except for the last one (for nearly all use cases).

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#88

Post by CitrusFruits »

n8cpdx wrote: post #75
Waterluvian wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can’t think of any reason not to use Slack exclusively as a website. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s a better experience IMO. For Teams, the only disadvantage is you can’t share your screen and video simultaneously when running as a tab; but I find the screen sharing experience to be better otherwise when running as a browser tab. Also: all of these “shitty” Electron apps work just as well on Linux as th…

Ii run Slack outside of a tab and in its app format because it's easier to navigate to using keyboard shortcuts and OS level features. That may not be enough for you, but it's plenty reason for me, and I imagine many others.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#89

Post by 323 »

This article reminds me of when assembly programmers were ranting how stupid it is to use the bloated C language to create apps when assembly is perfectly fine for that, and how it's all driven by lazy programmers who don't want to learn how to write efficient code.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#90

Post by destitude »

quanticle wrote: post #50
jcoletti wrote: post #30

"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.

I agree that these apps rarely crash , in the strict sense of the word. I don't think I've ever seen Slack get into a state where it's misbehaved to the point where the broader operating system has seen fit to kill the process. However, I have seen Slack get into weird states (like not updating read/unread status of messages, waiting forever for content to load, not showing notifications, etc) where the only way to f…

They do a good job of hiding when they crash by just reloading the entire web view. That happens quite often for me.
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