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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#181

Post by seanp2k2 »

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…

Spotify Desktop is kinda different from the website because of how it uses APIs locally to control things https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-fu...

VSCode is also appreciably different both in capability and implementation, https://franz-ajit.medium.com/understanding-visual-studio-co... but interesting that V8 debug protocol is becoming more common, so maybe that will come to a browser some day :)

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#182

Post by dragonwriter »

slothtrop wrote: post #119
Pxtl wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Should it not be possible to style a native GUI application with the same framework language as for a website?

> Should it not be possible to style a native GUI application with the same framework language as for a website?

Not if the native controls are strongly opinionated as to style language, such that there is limited themability, unless you go to the level that your “native GUI” is doing the equivalent of drawing and reading mouse touches from a canvas to implement a custom UI rather than using more specific native controls.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#183

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

IRC isn’t even remotely competitive vs Slack for 99% of its users. It’s the same ignorant take you hear from people who complain about Excel files. The overwhelming majority of users do not experience the cosmos at all like you do.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#185

Post by drdec »

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.

VSCode never crashes for me. Slack crashes rarely for me. More often, it just becomes unusably slow. Spotify crashes multiple times a day on me. The music keeps playing however, so it's only an issue when I want to make a change.

Is it possible to use the "windows" version of the Spotify electron client on Linux? That might make a difference since the Linux client is unsupported.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#186

Post by bmeski »

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 work on a massive CMS and he’s correct. There is an insane groupthink going on in webdev.

Another team in my org has spent a year reinventing our client side js so that our templates are now mixed with the svelte runtime. All to render/update cards on the page that can update when an api pings the page.

So 6 months later they’re still building the svelte integration and have only shipped 2 pages to users.

This is a cms where you should be able to create any page via a combination of SSR components but no, now it’s a mix of SSR, SSR svelte within handlebars, and client side svelte. So the edit ui is now a fragmented mess of parts of the page that can and can’t render, ruining the default model of the cms all because they couldn’t bear to write vanilla js. They also added react the year before and now it just sits there decaying.

Literally madness.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#187

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#188

Post by spamizbad »

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.…

I cut my teeth during that era and the level of complexity asked for from those apps was minor compared to what people will demand today. Your native app will also require every machine to install a bunch of extra libraries before they can even run your little CRUD app.

At some point you maybe wrote a cute little auto-update function that let you update the application automatically... until IT slapped your hand and told you never to do that ever again.

You could write a similar web app in any modern framework in just a few days as well, and have it work on any device with a browser. It updates automatically and IT doesn't give a shit. Yay!

I have a pet theory that one of the big things that drove SaaS adoption was that people didn't need to deal with IT gatekeeping. You could get the latest software RIGHT AWAY! As soon as the devs finished it! Incredible!

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#189

Post by chrisco255 »

Sebb767 wrote: post #93
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 sandbox…

Customers ultimately pay for engineering time, too.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#190

Post by dragonwriter »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #131

> The entry barrier to programming needs to [be] high! Programming is engineering, it's not something where you throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks Sadly this is the fallacy of all educated people: “… is and gained an excellence in, not throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks”. The reality is human improvement comes in two ways 1. Repetition for excellence and 2. Exploration for innovation. Innovative e…

> Sadly this is the fallacy of all educated people: “… is and gained an excellence in, not throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks”

No, it's the aspirational view of all insecure elite workers: “the job I do must have a high barrier to entry (otherwise, I will no longer command a premium salary)”.

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