Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the madness ever going to end?

unixsheikh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 629 posts

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#271

Post by Subsentient »

mbrodersen wrote: post #266
Subsentient wrote: post #229

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 a…

Your argument seems to be that bad developers write bad software? Isn’t that true no matter the platform? I have written equally successful software in both Electron and Qt. In my experience, a competent developer can write great software given almost any platform.

While that may be partly true, Electron inherently attracts low-skilled, incompetent programmers due to its 'easiness', while in reality JS isn't that much easier than, say, Python. Not only do you have to deal with dumber programmers writing the code, but what people forget is that CPU and RAM usage isn't just some metric you see in htop or Task Manager. Electron apps are much slower than native apps at doing almost anything, sometimes to the point of obscenity. That was a big reason we were forced to ditch Electron, the WebKit bullshit was just too much for what we were trying to do. No matter how many bugs I fixed, it was still a bloated sack of shit. Qt was easy to write. Sure you had to put a few #ifdefs here and there, but for the mostpart, it was portable, easy, and Qt Creator saved us a ton of time compared to baking our own. If you write any application in "native" widgets for the host OS, shame on you. That is definitely the wrong way to do things in almost every case nowadays. That said, Qt and GTK+ provide so much better of a user experience with only slightly increased difficulty. It's hard to justify Electron.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#272

Post by slg »

maxsilver wrote: post #237
slg wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks. It can only be used by people on desktops running Windows while they are at the office, but that is fine because that is the world of 2004. ... >People underestimate how simple Windows everywhere made life for developers. Amazing documentation, stupid good tooling, and an obscenely stable platform to develop…

> Even if everyone was running Windows on an corporate machine, it was still more difficult to deploy new code than it is today Is that true? As someone who was also doing native Windows desktop applications back then (C# and VB in .net from 2006-2010), ClickOnce handled everything pretty reliably for Windows XP/Vista/Server (even with weird DLL requirements -- for example, I had to ship a QuickBooks Desktop API wrap…

Well that Wikipedia page exists so I wasn't the only one running into the issue. I will note that the time period you listed is a few years after this problem peaked. These issues were a lot more pronounced in the VB Classic era and were greatly improved in the first few releases of the .Net Framework. Your timeframe is just after that.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#273

Post by psion »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #213
BeefWellington wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The original article isn't substantive. I mean, c'mon, the entirety of the argument against Electron apps is > They eat up all the memory you have and still ask for more. They constantly crash and has 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. I'm kind of a curmudgeon about E…

The big problem with his argument against PHP being a template engine is that it hasn't been developed with that in mind for quite some time. I think it's just a legacy feature to just echo out anything after a closing php tag and before a new open tag that WordPress still enjoys.

I'm of the opinion that anyone now who calls PHP a "template engine" hasn't actually looked at it since 2001.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#275

Post by thederf »

As I see it, the cause isn't industry-specific, it's just incredibly apparent because of how fast our industry repeats the cycle of:

- Make thing - Thing becomes ubiquitous and widely used - Thing has warts and limitations - Make new thing on top of old thing, because old thing can't be reworked without major consequences because of its ubiquity. Repeat.

If you've worked in any job with reasonably complex processes, there's likely a few procedures that no one really understands, but when people try to change them or build on them, they only break things or get more confusing.

Not sure what can be done about it, but I have a hard time blaming anyone or anything.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#276

Post by stemlord »

rdiddly wrote: post #221
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 comp…

Well it's a net negative for the end user, which should have been the priority for everyone involved, and what you're describing sounds like a corruption of this system. So I wouldn't call it an engineering thing, it seems far more general than that.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#277

Post by userbinator »

dtgriscom wrote: post #267
userbinator wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saving your own time and resources, in exchange for those of every one of your users . That insanely selfish attitude is why we are so incensed by this crap --- especially when it's developers making the lives of other developers worse. Have some respect for your users; they might be developers too.

You're presuming that these users would have a product, even if it took several times longer for the developers to build. That isn't always (or maybe even often) true. There are tradeoffs to be made; being absolutist about it isn't helpful.

I think there's already more than enough quantity; what we really need more of is quality.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#279

Post by jrochkind1 »

Uh... if Electron really let a 2-year-old baby (or, hell, even an eight-year-old) write software as widely used as appreciated as Slack, Signal (Desktop), or VSCode... I'd say that whoever wrote Electron should actually get a Turing Award, because that would be society-shaking!

I mean, no joke, democratizing software production is huge, and important, and hugely beneficial -- when more and more of our lives involve software, being able to produce it is hugely empowering. I don't know how much Electron really does that (we know it doesn't really let 2-year-old babies produce software), but that the author would find it of no benefit whatsoever if it did, or even something to make fun of or disparage...

When in other discussions people are like "the reason there aren't good no-code development tools is because software engineers don't want there to be, they are threatened by them, they keep them from us!" I'm usually like, nah, that's not what's going on... but it turns out they're literally talking about THIS GUY!

So anyway, I stopped reading there. Near the beginning.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#280

Post by namelosw »

It's simple:

1. Companies use Electron because they don't want to spend money on the desktop. After all, desktop users are declining.

2. You'll only get much worse, or not even usable softwares if you use the same small budgets to build native apps on multiple platforms.

Building an excellent Electron alternative that is not web-based is not in corporations' interest. Hackers are all ranting about Electron, but the only way to defeat Electron is to get together and build a high-quality open-source alternative because not many will pay for it, or it would be just rants forever.

Post reply on HN