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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#171

Post by profmonocle »

> 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.

Rudeness aside, this shouldn't be dismissed. The same designers you already have on staff who make your web sites look nice can make your desktop apps look nice using the skills they already have. Things like React Native mean that the engineers who make your web app can make your mobile apps (on both major platforms at once!), again using mostly the same skill set.

Yes, this leads to lower quality software! Electron apps use tons of memory and have huge binaries, React Native apps take longer to launch, etc. But the cost savings are hard to dismiss, especially for startups trying to get to market ASAP. And most importantly, the market doesn't seem to be punishing companies using these lower-performing technologies at all, so why would you not use them?

As someone who works with stuff the author hates (I work with Angular, NativeScript, and reverse proxies on a daily basis) I agree that it's all horribly inefficient and I'd love to to it the "right" way. I just love the time savings more.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#172

Post by astrange »

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,…

RAM isn't cheap when you're an OEM. At some point you can't pass on the cost to customers because your suppliers can't get you any more.

The actual issue to customers is more memory use means more swapping, which is silent and slows down or eats up the disk.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#173

Post by seanp2k2 »

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…

Hey, look, it's simple: just spend $5k on a new top-of-the-line M1 Max MacBook, then it'll be as fast as IRC was on a 133Mhz MMX Pentium 1.

Slack is great; it's like "hey, we took IRC and added inline images, now it's three orders of magnitude slower". Google Sheets is great in the same way: "hey, we took Excel and removed half the features plus now it's a few orders of magnitude slower BUT EASIER TO SHARE THINGS". Spotify is similar: "Like WinAmp, but slow, but with a subscription you can listen to most of what you want immediately and share things easily." These are in ascending order of their actual value compared to their predecessors, I guess.

Distributing the load of webapps makes sense if you've ever had to run a few thousand web servers running PHP apps, but yeah, running a framework server-side to render the page again and calling it modern is just kinda...the same thing we had before with a fresh coat of paint and more levels of abstraction.

Back in the day, we had CPAN, PEAR, and PECL. Now we have NPM and approximately 18 trillion modules. You can get stuff that does all kinds of useful types of manipulation, but under the hood some of it is still just a wrapper around some combination of zlib, FFmpeg, OpenSSL, and maybe Boost, plus TensorFlow or OpenCV (which can use FFmpeg) these days.

The amount of truly novel problems we're solving still seems low. "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away", or I guess these days, "What Lisa giveth, Sundar taketh away"?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> I’m very critical when a company like Slack cannot find the time and resources to make native clients.

It's not a matter of finding resources, it's a matter of finding that to be the best use of resources. Obviously they could have native apps for major desktop platforms with the energy put into the Electron app, and performance would probably be better, but would they have feature parity? And if you increase the resources, would the best use of that increase be into maintaining native apps for each platform of Electron?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#175

Post by qayxc »

hnuser847 wrote: post #104
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?

I truly think it's more craft than engineering, and even that's somewhat generous. It's mostly guesswork, hacks, inter-team politics, and trend chasing. Imagine an engineering team designing a toaster. They have real constraints to consider, like physically fitting all of the components inside a single package and selecting materials that won't melt during operation. They have to ensure that product won't injure the…

> Software is expected to rot and be rewritten every 3-5 years in the latest language du jour.

That's simply not true in general. There are plenty of fields where this is not the case. Control software for airplanes, power plants, medical implants, military equipment, etc.; also banking- and insurance software, certain scientific HPC libraries, software for spacecraft (especially deep space missions) and so on.

The software world doesn't just consist of web development, cloud computing, and cheap consumer products :)

Ten years ago I did some consulting for a large merchant wholesaler and their backend ran on IBM mainframes. At some point I was maintaining CICS programs written in high level assembly with changelogs dating back to 1984 (after getting some coaching from the resident senior programmer first).

This was a multi-billion dollar business and the software had to work. 24/7, 365 days a year. Every minute the system was down cost thousands of dollars. If you managed to mess up the system controlling the warehouse logistics, monetary loss was the least of your concerns, though - a dozen angry truck drivers asking for the guy in IT who messed up their schedule was far scarier :D

So yeah, in environments like this, every little change or update had to be carefully planned and agreed upon by all stakeholders from all departments.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#176

Post by kristjansson »

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?

All code is craft; the systems they implement are engineering.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#177

Post by jonny_eh »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #173
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…

Hey, look, it's simple: just spend $5k on a new top-of-the-line M1 Max MacBook, then it'll be as fast as IRC was on a 133Mhz MMX Pentium 1. Slack is great; it's like "hey, we took IRC and added inline images, now it's three orders of magnitude slower". Google Sheets is great in the same way: "hey, we took Excel and removed half the features plus now it's a few orders of magnitude slower BUT EASIER TO SHARE THINGS". S…

Slack has way more killer features than inline images, such as easy to control authentication.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#178

Post by gruez »

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…

>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.

did they fix multi-stream video yet? last time I checked in the browser version you could only see one video stream (ie. webcam), whereas on the desktop app you could see multiple.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#179

Post by daveidol »

BeefWellington wrote: post #170
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.

Others on here are doing that. A few counterpoints: 1. Electron is cross platform - something the author never even mentions, 2. Really, PHP is the prefect end state for web development of all scale?

The lack of even acknowledging these things is what really discredits the author in my book.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#180

Post by Underphil »

BeefWellington wrote: post #170
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.

Absolutely agreed. The original poster, if more knowledgeable, should set the record straight. Attacking the article without any valid counter is just point-scoring.
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