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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?

#161

Post by clusterfish »

ryandrake wrote: post #155
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…

It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if Electron was less resource intensive, yes. There's Tauri and other alternatives that will eventually replace it and solve the performance problem.

You can blame OS vendors for trying to build a moat with OS-specific, not web-compatible UI toolkits. Don't want to touch that, don't have to, thankfully.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#162

Post by goodpoint »

phailhaus wrote: post #85

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 b…

Not at all. Having worked on all sort of companies and applications, the author is absolutely right.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#163

Post by floodyberry- »

tlackemann wrote: post #3

This is why I get paid top dollar as a consultant ;) When a company's top engineers decide to rewrite their stack in JavaScript, I get to swoop in, take $10k and tell them their old PHP monolith was just fine. Long live idiots, for I'll always get paid

No post body was provided.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#164

Post by BeefWellington »

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".

I'd argue it's not cheaper overall, just for the company choosing to do the development.

What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#165

Post by wowokay »

codefined wrote: post #141
ozfive wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack in browser tab user here. Got sick of the app and how slow it was pretty fast. It's just not worth it.

Not a Slack user here. Is the app version _slower_ than the website? I assumed that since Electron is only a little bit more than a Chromium wrapper that they would have identical performance.

Long time slack app user here, I don’t know how you guys organize your slack but performance has never been an issue for our organization, I don’t think it would run any better then it currently does if it were an os native app, of course my machine isn’t a toaster.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#166

Post by BeefWellington »

codefined wrote: post #141
ozfive wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack in browser tab user here. Got sick of the app and how slow it was pretty fast. It's just not worth it.

Not a Slack user here. Is the app version _slower_ than the website? I assumed that since Electron is only a little bit more than a Chromium wrapper that they would have identical performance.

It's not just the app being slower than the website, it's what it does to the rest of your machine.

Contained within a tab Slack can only use a set amount of resources allotted by the browser.

Whereas installing the app means it can go full hog.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#167

Post by jakub_g »

There are a few things:

Problem 1: is that all native platform owners built they own empires around their proprietary APIs as their competitive advantage. It's easier to do this, especially early, to crash to competition. Now the things have matured and various platform have extremely similar capabilities. Not the same, and not the same perf, but like 90% are overlapping.

Problem 2: Distributing things via web is orders of magnitude easier than anything else. No need to fly half of the world to install stuff on client machines, or send him a CD to do it themselves. No need to wait for the lords from Apple, Google or Microsoft to kindly verify your app (which takes a week). You can release on the web as much as you want. 100 deploys per day? Sure why not, if your CI can handle it.

Problem 3: People are reluctant to install stuff, or can't (not much space on device, no admin etc.). Web just works, for anyone (assuming moderately up-to-date OS).

Problem 4: Be generous, imagine you have infinite resources and money is not an issue. Now you need to build the same bloody thing for web, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS...

Fine, Alice built a Windows version and Bob built a Mac version. But hey, there's a small discrepancy in algorithm in the two. And the labels are different in the two, oops. Shit, translations in German are different too! Yadda yadda yadda, been there done that. And Windows team has higher velocity than Windows, what we do now? We want to have feature parity at all times.

It's not impossible, but the bigger the company, those overheads on every little thing become insane. Maintaining two+ enormous codebases in different techs to be in sync visually, algorithmically, localization, release process-wise... Good luck.

And hiring experience native devs is ultra hard and expensive. Hiring tens/hundreds of them, even more. I'm not surprised big companies get away from native; especially since web version are de facto mandatory for all kinds of software those days.

Now, iOS is different because Apple puts a lot of restrictions around what is allowed and about monetization. Plus the quality bar is pretty high. And iOS has some capabilities that are difficult to obtain from web browser technologies. Tough call, iOS native that is.

The blog post addresses none of those issues. I wonder if the OP ever worked on a team who had to ship the same product across 3+ tech stacks.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#168

Post by afarrell »

qayxc wrote: post #150
afarrell wrote: post #17

> Programming is engineering Is it? Genuine question that I've been asking myself for the past several years: In what senses is software engineering actually an engineering discipline? If you make a project trade-off for the sake of code maintainability, is that based on empirically tested knowledge or following a design pattern guided by an artisan's intuition about how code will be interpreted?

This is a question I've struggled with ever since I started working in the field. In terms of definition, software development ticks all the boxes - depending on who you ask. Yet every way you look at it, something just doesn't feel right. Sure, there's best practices, models, a strong mathematical foundation, but on the other hand there's way too much freedom. By "freedom" I strictly mean lack of limitations. While…

> Sure, there's best practices, models, a strong mathematical foundation, but on the other hand there's way too much freedom.

I wonder if the same could be said of animation.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#169

Post by bmeski »

clusterfish wrote: post #161
ryandrake wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if E…

No post body was provided.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#170

Post by BeefWellington »

phailhaus wrote: post #85

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 b…

I don't necessarily disagree with your take but I think you should be making substantive counter-arguments to what the author wrote. Your post is essentially just attacking the author and of little substance in itself.
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