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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?

#91

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

> The entry barrier to programming needs to high! 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.

Reading this, made me wish the entry barrier to writing was higher. I mean you should definitely have a copy editor and proof reader to make sure you are not leaving out words (such as “be” in the first sentence). Back when writing first started, you had to get your own clay and cut your own cuneiform stylus and carefully craft your characters and then bake your tablets. Now, any random person on the Internet can write.

/s

Actually this aspect of programming is what makes it so exciting. There are no gatekeepers. You can throw stuff up against the wall and see what sticks. You are basically limited only by your imagination, creativity, and time in what you build. This low barrier of entry to programming is to be celebrated and we should be working to lower it even further.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#92

Post by fennecfoxen »

the_only_law wrote: post #20

I mean, I don’t necessarily disagree with the main point, but this feels like a short argument with straw-men and poor faith. Personally, I think another commenter got it right pointing to commoditization (interestingly I find the commoditization of computing in general has greatly decreased my interest in it, but that’s a me problem), though I always find the ire towards web dev as the root of all evil to be a littl…

> I’d rather inherit an overcomplicated Laravel application from someone that an overcomplicated raw-PHP monolith.

Similar sentiments. Say what you want about overengineering and React/Redux with strong opinions™ on the paradigm and insane transpile / build / asset-transformation pipelines... I'd much rather have that than JavaScript code-snippets written to the page in the middle of nested for-loops (inside a database query result iterator) in HTML::Mason (i.e. "Perl pretending that it's PHP"). Which has happened.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#93

Post by Sebb767 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #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,…

> 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).

It's worth noting here that Electron trades engineer time you pay for against RAM your customers pay for.

On the other hand, Electron got things to a state where Linux is often supported and where I can usually run the whole app well sandboxed in my browser. So in the end, it's not that bad for end-users like me, either.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#95

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?

#96

Post by SavantIdiot »

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…

> shittier performance

Depends what you're writing. People aren't going to write performance-sensitive apps in Electron, like FPS games where customers demand 4K 120 FPS with full graphics enabled. But for Image burners (balena), Drone software (Betaflight), and Sophisticated code editors (VSCode), it's hardly a concern.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#97

Post by azangru »

> So, now your simple news article or blog post takes ages to load on a 1 gigabit connection and requires about 3 times as much electrical power even though you're only serving text and perhaps a few images

If all the website is doing is serving news articles or blog posts, then sure. But, web is increasingly used to build apps. Apps are different from documents. No, it isn't crazy to build apps that run in the browser; web has a fantastic distribution story. And apps can't be reduced to a markup language and a stylesheet.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#98

Post by giraffe_lady »

destitude wrote: post #90
quanticle wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a valid strategy though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#99

Post by Pxtl »

meetups323 wrote: post #81
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…

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 web…

I'm kinda hopeful that Maui+Blazor will eventually let us have our cake and eat it too - instead of "everything is web", do "everything is a desktop-style gui framework" including the web. Although AFAIK they don't even have a web renderer on the horizon right now - purely desktop+mobile.

Of course, there will be angry PMs and designers that will be upset that their website looks like it was spat out of a desktop GUI framework instead of looking exactly how they want it to look. I remember people whining about how desktop-looking ExtJS was back in the day... this was for an inventory-management application, shouldn't it look like a desktop productivity app?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#100

Post by switchbak »

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…

I've been out of the GUI scene for a long time, but I will say I've been hella-impressed with some of the more modern Qt tech.

QML gives you JS for the view layer (and some logic if you desire), and a declarative way to lay out your UI. I think it's worth a comparison as a reasonable way to quickly iterate on a UI while having something very lean and portable as the output product.

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