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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?

#241

Post by godDLL »

razemio wrote: post #69

I am going to ask and duck. What is a seriously good cross platform (yes also web) [meaning windows, Linux, Mac, Android, ios, web] alternative to electron? I used haxe 2/3 (openfl), javafx, qt. No they are not even close. Next thing what is bad about vscode? I really like this application as a prime example of perfect cross platform compatibility. It is also electron based. Just because 90% is shit (because it is fa…

Add raspi to your cross platform list. Now tell me how VScode runs.

Kinda crap, is it not? Barely usable.

And how do we fix that? We can't.

I mean it's not a Commodore. It's a raspi. It streams 4K video and decodes it onto your projector on the fly.

But editing code using a popular solution is not any good.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#244

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

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’m not sure I want an app designed by a baby though. Chances are they missed something important.

I’m not saying I agree entirely, but I’ll say this… every day I’m writing embedded microcontroller code, I’m getting my ass kicked. I’ve been doing it for sometime, it doesn’t really get easier, I just am able to write code that does more with the same hardware. It’s tough work imo. … then I hop on a YouTube channel and see some messaging queue system, and the guy writes four lines in two files, does some npm magic and that’s it, he has a server running and multiple clients connecting and queuing and etc. Very cool… but…

This guy is talking about how he has no idea how it works, it just does…

The high bar might be welcome for when it “just doesn’t anymore”. Because I don’t care if a website sucks, but do care if my furnace stops or a plane falls out of the sky or a bad queuing system causes a global shipping deadlock, etc.

Maybe the bar should be low for bringing people in, and high for people that actually make things.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#245

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

to be fair though, isn't "it's cheaper" just the same thing the article laments from the consumer side? It just extends the argument from "devs are cheap" to "users are cheap as well"

the overriding concern seems to be that if we continue to stack crappy tech on top of crappy tech and accept it as consumers for twenty years we've built the tower of Babel (some might argue we're there already) and that this is terrible long term engineering.

If we treated semiconductors or aerospace engineering the same way we wouldn't have any chips to run electron software on and the planes would keep falling out of the sky.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#246

Post by qwerty456127 »

> 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?

This probably is because the industry wants backwards compatibility. It almost seems a miracle we have finally switched to Python 3 and stopped importing Unicode support "from the future".

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#247

Post by scoofy »

This feels like flame-bait.

As someone with a background in philosophy of language, the idea that i can write a program in python instead of C is basically my barrier for entry.

I learned first-order logic, and I don't have a degree in CS.

Does that make me a bad coder? Maybe. I can still apply my knowledge of logic to solve a lot of problems that someone who spent years learning C instead of studying mathematical logic can't.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#248

Post by godDLL »

fleddr wrote: post #101

It's a good rant. Basically, our computing foundation is from the 70s and we keep stacking crap on top. Given hardware advancements, it's embarrassing how we're making the user experience worse, not better. What happened is speed. You need to ship fast or you're dead. The need for speed is not just because of commercial dynamics, also because of another major industry failure: programmer productivity did not scale up…

You should. Blog.

I have a title for you, for your first piece:

Robots trade, CEOs fidget, managers require, coders put shit out.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#249

Post by nyanpasu64 »

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…

Honestly I like well-designed modern C++ as a library/app developer; it's fast, type-safe, and (more or less) expressive. The worst thing about it is unnecessarily complex syntax/concepts (TMP scares me, `template using Foo` simplifies code, concepts are complicated but help avoid TMP) and slow compile times (unavoidable to my knowledge) I looked at nlohmann/json's homepage and I find the API surface perfectly readable (if you avoid ""_json and the more complex stuff, I didn't look at the library itself).

Similarly I think that fmtlib is a beautiful piece of software (fmt::memory_buffer is beautiful, but I dislike the mysterious template errors when you write code wrong, and poor documentation for how to avoid them). It's as convenient as C format strings (but type-safe, and thankfully uses fat strings composed of a pointer and length, or begin and end, rather than null-terminated strings with O(n) strlen), and much better than C++ streams, which hold string formatting state (setw, precision) which is wholly wasteful for binary file IO, and is evil global state (possibly TU-local) for console IO.

Modern C++ also a lot better than the 3+ layer deep inheritance hierarchies of 2000s C++, where Child::f() delegates to Base::f() which calls g(), which is a virtual function pointing to Subclass::g(), which delegates to Base::g(), which is alive and well in Qt and KDE code.

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