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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#301

Post by chipotle_coyote »

psion wrote: post #273
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd compare it more to the way you can use Ruby as its own template language. I don't think I'd really build a PHP app in 2022 the way I would have built it in 2002, but I'd be okay with using "pure PHP" templates, assuming I trusted whoever was creating the templates not to blatantly abuse it. (I know that could be a big assumption in some contexts…)

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#302

Post by aemreunal »

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…

> These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions

All engineering (including "real" ones like civil or mechanical) is about fitting your requirements within budgets. When one's building a skyscraper, you try to build it in a way that minimizes the cost while satisfying all requirements (it shouldn't fall down given such and such conditions, etc.)

Engineering is largely the art of solving problems that fit in real-world constraints and one such [major] constraint it cost. When you build software, you're not given 10 years, a research team and infinite money. You're given just enough resources to build something that satisfies requirements and is the lowest cost (financially and temporally). There's always a way to build things "better" but that's not the point.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#303

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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…

Its best to understand early that an Engineer deals in two commodities: money and time. Their job is not to create ivory-tower ideal solutions. The whole problem, the reason Engineers exists, is to manage technology such that the constraints of money and time can be met.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#304

Post by ReactiveJelly »

stemlord wrote: post #276
rdiddly wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not corruption. I'm just mad that my Qt skills are worthless now. It's hard detaching my ego as a programmer from the economics of programming.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#305

Post by int_19h »

cheschire wrote: post #238
martinald wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually surprised either Microsoft, Slack or a new startup in the space haven't made a native app yet. Wouldn't even need to be all of them; Teams could be a native Windows app and keep the electron one for mac/linux/mobile. Or Slack could make a native Mac one first. Seems quite mad considering the use/value of the tools and the absolutely enormous user base they have.

Teams moved to Edge instead of Electron. Your point still stands though. Not sure why they decided this was the way. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams...

Because they already have a codebase that uses HTML for UI, and a team that's proficient in it?

It's also worth remembering that HTML UI is technically "native" on Windows since Win8, where HTML/JS was one of the three stacks supported by all the new WinRT stuff - and, indeed, the one most heavily pushed.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#306

Post by baryphonic »

I don't disagree with the theme, but it would be much more persuasive coming from a Lisp corner of the world.

Just today, I was discussing with a friend about the lack of tail calls in mainstream languages (outside of FP), and how the typical reason cited ("you lose debug stack traces!") makes no sense under any scrutiny (the stack losses from looping are necessarily total, yet tail calls can easily be implemented flexibly to allow for optional stack growth in certain situations like debugging). So we get more complexity (iterative loops) because the pop culture of software development repeats irrational conclusions (apparently) without thinking.

Same goes for folk advice like "never rewrite" (okay, okay, it went badly for Netscape once, or something), "never build your own tools/languages" (yes, this isn't software, but the Empire State Building was constructed within a single year by a firm that constructed all of its own tools custom for the job), "role-based access control is necessary for security" (capabilities are actually quite cool), "always reset your password every three months" (lulz). There are many others.

I am starting to believe that behind every phrase of false but universally-accepted IT folk wisdom s a billion dollar idea waiting to be demonstrated; extra if you can combine a few together AND give the currently lost wanderers out there a bridge to the simpler, more enduring way.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#307

Post by int_19h »

slg wrote: post #193
com2kid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

>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…

I was doing that exact work back then, as well, and DLL hell was mostly gone by then. If you had a dependency, you simply packaged it alongside your main binary, and it wouldn't affect any other app on the system. DLL hell only arose when apps would try to install their dependencies globally (i.e. into \WINDOWS or \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32), but it was already rather uncommon by early 2000s, except for the most foundational runtimes like the C++ one.

.NET pretty much solved the problem even for globally deployed dependencies by imposing physical versioning, and added file signatures for good measure, so that your dependency would literally be on that exact copy of the DLL.

I had direct experience with some apps in VB6, some in Delphi, some in .NET/WinForms, and even one in C++/wxWindows. None of them had any DLL hell issues. Not as in I dealt with them, but as in they simply never arose in the first place.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#308

Post by pc86 »

aemreunal wrote: post #302
rdiddly wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions All engineering (including "real" ones like civil or mechanical) is about fitting your requirements within budgets. When one's building a skyscraper, you try to build it in a way that minimizes the cost while satisfying all requirements (it shouldn't fall down given such and such conditions, etc.) Engineering is largely the art of solving problems that…

If HN had an equivalent of Reddit Gold, this comment would deserve a couple of them.

Engineering without constraints is easy, but it's not engineering.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#309

Post by RandyRanderson »

I call this: PLIRT - Pyric, Low Interest Rate tech.

Low interest rates drive money into speculative hands and then in into the salaries of tech cargo cultists, Resume Oriented Architects, Tech mono-hammer-wielders[0] and other people who should never be given the power to make decisions. This creates all sort of bad ideas and tech. We are in a monstrous PLIRT bubble ATM. Pyric because them winning means all of us losing.

[0] Every problem's soln is methodA/techX: the only one these ppl ever use.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#310

Post by int_19h »

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…

Barrier is perhaps the wrong metaphor here; it's more of a slope. So then the question becomes: do you make the slope less steep but longer, so that climbing it easier, but you end up at the same elevation in the end, just having spent more time? Or do you dial down the overall elevation, so that the climb is less steep and takes the same amount of time?

Both are valid approaches to democratizing technology, but the last one results in reduction of quality. And also higher profits, which is likely why it won in the end. Given the existence of the other approach, though, I think there are valid grounds for complaint here.

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