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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?

#221

Post by rdiddly »

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 think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills.

...and not specific to computers either, or even the private sector. In a past career I was a civil engineer, and I learned about how traffic light green times (how many seconds a signal stays green for one direction vs. the cross street) usually have a "right answer" from an engineering standpoint, which as you can imagine, has to do with maximizing traffic throughput and/or minimizing delays to each individual vehicle. And then the mayor of the town shows up out of the blue and says no, this direction is going to have a longer wait, I'm going to delay people intentionally, so that when they're stuck in traffic, sitting there, they'll have more of a chance to see signs/placards of, and contemplate patronizing, nearby businesses, whose owners are my political backers. That made a big impression on me... must have, because I feel like I've told that story in an HN comment before... but anyway... yep.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#223

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #190
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)”.

[deleted]

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#224

Post by spc476 »

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.…

Wow! I remember working for a company having to deal with your 2022 scenario way back in 1997! Only back then we didn't have npm, react, or any other of a dozen Javascript frameworks I've forgotten the name of.

Oh, and we did it without Visual Studio as well. Kids today.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#225

Post by hardee »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #92
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 databa…

n+1 problem is a choice, and programmer fault, not unique to any of that.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#226

Post by datenarsch »

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.…

> And unless you were writing drivers, that major OS version wasn't going to break anything.

Just a minor nitpick, but the NT device driver API has in fact stayed largely the same since Windows 2000 and in comparison to the various technologies that came and went in userland.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#227

Post by lucideer »

This is a bad article, but it's a great example of why tech like Electron have succeeded.

This article is a long boring rant with zero insights, in which the author never thinks to ask why...

> Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry? Has everyone except the "unix greybeards" gone mad!?

... ok he does use the word "why" once but only in a rhetorical question. It's never asked honestly.

Electron solves problems that "unix greybeards" have been loudly and wilfully sticking their heads in the sand about for decades. Yes, it solves them badly, but that's a lot better than not solving them at all.

... he also complains briefly about PHP templating libraries which tells me he's never had to mitigate XSS vulnerabilities in large PHP applications.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#228

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

While I can get behind the idea that lowering barriers to entry is a good idea, I don't think that's the same thing as tolerating ludicrously slow garbage tools just because everyone insist on either developing like a baby or only hiring babies. As an industry, we should be deeply ashamed at how much of the world's time and resources are wasted running poor software so a company can save a few bucks.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#229

Post by Subsentient »

The company I work for hired several incompetent devs who wrote an abortion of an Electron client. It very nearly killed the company. I finally convinced the boss to let me rewrite it in Qt, and now our feedback is far, far more positive on the UX. Qt and GTK+ are one of those things that work "well enough" on the big three, especially Qt (GTK+ has serious theming issues on macOS), and it's hard to justify Electron as long as Qt or at least GTK+ exist.

Fuck Electron. I've seen what it can do to a product firsthand. If you get a competent web dev, it might work, but it will be slower than snail shit. Just write it in Qt. You don't need to use C++, Qt has bindings for many languages, including Python, Rust, JS with Qt Quick, and even Lua. Myself, I don't mind modern C++, though in many cases I prefer Rust.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#230

Post by scotty79 »

I don't understand how can you diss Electron when you see something like VS Code or Atom.

The benefits are clear. This software could grow plugin ecosystem vastly exceeding anything that was previously possible even after pouring millions of dollars into it.

Electron is better than everything else by various engineering metrics. Just not RAM or CPU usage. And despite large RAM and CPU usage it manages to be way faster than many native IDEs that came before.

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