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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?

#251

Post by mhitza »

jonny_eh wrote: post #177
seanp2k2 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by easy to control authentication?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#252

Post by phailhaus »

superkuh wrote: post #235
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 feel comfortable asserting you've never not used a complex web application, even for your personal non-commercial projects made for fun. The fact that his website (and other projects) is in HTML and doesn't need to be executed is a confirmation of the article ideas not some deficit. You can justify what you do with JS for money however you want but businesses do it that way because managers decided it's cheapest wa…

What is the purpose of his website? It is to serve static content. But obviously, his entire rant is against more complex, interactive, and stateful applications. It's strange to argue that because static sites exist, all sites should be static.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#253

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

To those that agree with the author: it's quite disheartening to beginners (often learning JS as a first language) to hear these things. It's just purposeless gatekeeping that borders on anonymous hazing. Who in good conscience can assert:

>The entry barrier to programming needs to high!

as a blanket statement. It's an absurd assertion that seems to presume all programming does or should take place at the same level of mission-criticality/resource efficiency/engineering elegance.

To get a bit meta: I remember ~7 years ago when I was starting my career, these kinds of uncharitable, gatekeepy screeds would mostly just elicit nods of agreement from the HN masses (while making me wonder if I could ever be a "real programmer", severely exacerbating my imposter syndrome). I'm glad the web tech Overton window has shifted somewhat and there is more push-back now.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#254

Post by beebmam »

bmeski wrote: post #186
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…

I might find your argument more persuasive if you didn't use such extreme language.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#255

Post by jabbany »

switchbak wrote: post #100
ramesh31 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why? Because in the time that OP spends tracking down segfaults and getting a dozen native libraries to compile for his native app, the JS dev has already finished XYZ feature. And because the environment is so high level, he can use the extra brain capacity for thing…

I've been out of the GUI scene for a long time, but I will say I've been hella-impressed with some of the more modern Qt tech. QML gives you JS for the view layer (and some logic if you desire), and a declarative way to lay out your UI. I think it's worth a comparison as a reasonable way to quickly iterate on a UI while having something very lean and portable as the output product.

Wait, isn't Qt proprietary? I feel like that kind of vendor lock-in alone disqualifies it for a lot of use cases...

There seems to be a dearth of actually open, native, and cross-platform GUI toolkits.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#256

Post by n8cpdx »

gruez wrote: post #178
n8cpdx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last I used it I could see multiple people simultaneously. I could even do Together Mode, but it seemed to be rendered on a server somewhere and streamed, rather than done locally. Maybe they were doing that with webcams and I just didn’t notice.

The main reason I was using the browser was so I could use Stylus to make it compact just like Slack. That’s another benefit of the browser approach, but ideally it would not be so obviously inferior to competitors.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#258

Post by userbinator »

The author is very on-point about reinventing the same things over and over again, sometimes with even less functionality than their predecessors, and also consuming more resources while doing it.

Seeing how far the demoscene has taken the C64 and ZX, I wonder if we'd see some sort of resurgence in skill if there was some sort of mandate on maximum hardware requirements, e.g. something like a 1GHz Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. That would've been a very comfortable machine in the early 2000s to do things like text messaging and audio/video calls, and in fact I did. Yet, having experienced the Horror of Microsoft Teams (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20678938), on a machine far more powerful, the decline is definitely real.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#259

Post by buu700 »

scotty79 wrote: post #230

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 faste…

It's surprising to me that a Linux/Unix enthusiast of all people is so incensed about Electron and web tech.

The alternative to Electron isn't that all their apps would be faster and more stable. It's that many of them wouldn't exist (either on Linux or in general), and the ones that did exist would inherently be more resource-constrained on the development side — potentially resulting in increased bugs, instability, security vulnerabilities, worse performance, lack of feature parity, and/or ultimately even premature deprecation to focus on higher-priority platforms. The web is a great equalizer.

I'll put this another way: given the option, all else being equal, would anyone honestly choose to run the same app in the form of WinForms + Wine rather than just Electron? It might be a little faster for certain apps in the best case scenario, but on average it's going to be worse in just about every way; that's before taking into account that in real life all else is never equal (see previous paragraph).

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#260

Post by userbinator »

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…

If you want to make the world's fastest performing, native, bug-free, warning-and-lint-free, most beautiful and elegant software project, you're going to have your lunch eaten by the competitor who throws together a barely-working, bloated JavaScript mess in 1/10 the time.

On the other hand, things like kdb+ and the like show that there is a market for excellence. It's unfortunately rare, but it's there.

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