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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#151

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

Internet complaining gets eyeballs. Look at this comment thread. Look at the position in the HN queue.

I'm not a fan of it. I understand the author's complaints and frustrations (I am also "chronologically-challenged"), but I have found that complaining doesn't really buy me much. I'll do a minor whine, from time to time (usually about the ageism in tech), but, for the most part, I try to bring some light to the conversation.

I write native (Swift) apps for Apple systems. I tend to avoid the "bleeding edge," as that isn't really where Ship lives, but I think that the way I do things, results in very good software (note that I didn't say "better software," as comparing against others only pisses people off, and doesn't buy me anything -unlike a lot of folks, I'm not in competition with anyone).

Of course, that doesn't prevent others from sneering at me, but that's their burden. I'm not exactly sure what benefit it gives them, as I am no threat.

If people like the way I do things, and want to improve that, then I am often fairly helpful, but I am not really into standing in the street, yelling at passing cars. I have better things to do.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#152

Post by jaybrendansmith »

Jensson wrote: post #121
petepete wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a huge pity that we're so reliant on platforms instead of protocols - there would be native Slack clients for every platform. Few companies even allow proper API access. Spotify buck the trend, Spot is a fantastic app https://github.com/xou816/spot

Small companies loves protocols, but as they become big and dominant they start pivoting to platforms to exert control and extract more profits from the ecosystem. We need regulations around platforms, protocols are inherently more powerful and from the perspective of humanity almost always preferable over platforms, so the incentives of companies should reflect that, but it isn't right now. Stuff like email, http et…

web 3.0, anyone?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#153

Post by Wowfunhappy »

arilotter wrote: post #35

> The entry barrier to programming needs to [be] high! I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I think the author's view that frameworks like Electron offer "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." is missing the point that a "2-year-old baby" making something shiny you…

I agree. And the thing is, you could take out that final paragraph and I'd agree with every other word in the piece.

It should be perfectly possible to write libraries and frameworks which are easier to use without writing additional layers of abstraction. Instead of writing a new template language in PHP on top of PHP, we could write it in C (or Rust) and it shouldn't be substantially slower or more resource intensive.

This would of course require an experienced programmer who knows a lower level language, but then the barrier to entry would be lower for everyone else!

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#155

Post by ryandrake »

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 mean, this isn't the first time in history that quality and performance got thrown under the bus for the sake of cost. When developer salaries are your highest cost, and you have to make more and more money, eventually everything will get (and has gotten) sacrificed at the altar of "developer cost".

Historically, commercial software development has never been the place for perfectionist "software craftsmanship". If you want to make the world's fastest performing, native, bug-free, warning-and-lint-free, most beautiful and elegant software project, you're going to have your lunch eaten by the competitor who throws together a barely-working, bloated JavaScript mess in 1/10 the time. The people who take pride and "sand the back of the cabinet" go out of business. At the end of the day, customers (broad generalization) don't seem to care about performance or quality. So, purely by survival of the fittest, these frameworks are going to take over every software project they possibly can. Sad if you care about native/performance, but inevitable as the tide.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#156

Post by paulcole »

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…

> You're welcome to use the websites instead of the desktop apps for any of those, though you'll lose some OS integration capability.

On the flip side, when you use them as websites, you gain the benefit of extending them through browser add-ons and extensions. An example where I work is that everyone uses Asana’s website because our Everhour extension works in Chrome but there’s no equivalent for Asana’s desktop app.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#157

Post by erosenbe0 »

com2kid wrote: post #47
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…

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple CRUD app so your employees can work with some structured data in a DB somewhere, let's say so sales can check inventory levels in an existing database. A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks.…

Don't forget supporting several localizations, currencies, timezones, and reformatting numbers and seperators dependent on region & user preference.

Alrighty, BRB while I finish my dropdown for converting from metric to "donkeyhooves per camelpower."

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#158

Post by jchw »

I’m starting to wonder if everyone who makes these arguments has even tried making a native app across Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s actually challenging to do it with Electron/React Native, and as much as I love/loved Qt, all of the effort of making things work and look nice, packaging for each platform, then coming up with a separate strategy for mobile because Qt is not good on mobile is not ideal.

I don’t disagree that Electron apps kind of suck, but it has practical answers to problems that Qt, for example, doesn’t. There’s nothing like Electron Builder…

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#159

Post by kbenson »

Jensson wrote: post #121
petepete wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a huge pity that we're so reliant on platforms instead of protocols - there would be native Slack clients for every platform. Few companies even allow proper API access. Spotify buck the trend, Spot is a fantastic app https://github.com/xou816/spot

Small companies loves protocols, but as they become big and dominant they start pivoting to platforms to exert control and extract more profits from the ecosystem. We need regulations around platforms, protocols are inherently more powerful and from the perspective of humanity almost always preferable over platforms, so the incentives of companies should reflect that, but it isn't right now. Stuff like email, http et…

There are tradeoffs beyond just the company making more money, as Moxie's recent web3 assessment covered. Protocols take much longer to evolve, platforms are quick to evolve.

Allowing platforms to innovate but somehow incentivizingnor requiring opening up what they've built seems like it would be the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure how that could be done well.

If people actually paid for usage, that would be one thing, because then it would be all about getting people to use your platform so you made more money, and having others innovate on too of it that you could fold into it would be cost effective. In the world of free APIs and services, it's all about keeping control of every bit.

Maybe all it needs is a nudge to make the decision to hoard all data no longer worth while. Make companies liable for PII that's lost and make someone's PII their own property only to be used with their agreement and maybe the rest will start to fall out of it.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#160

Post by aikiplayer »

There are times when complex frameworks are necessary because they've already dealt with the complexity and times when they're overkill or stupidly inefficient.

The point being made in other comments about minimizing dev time vs maximizing reach / impact is really solid (re: Electron).

My real takeaway from the rant (which I found pretty amusing) was that the author isn't terribly effective at discussing these issues with others and feels like they just get labeled as 'Old' when trying to do so.

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