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

311–320 of 629 posts

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#311

Post by indigochill »

BeefWellington wrote: post #164
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". I'd argue it's not cheaper overall, just for the company choosing to do the development. What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance.

And yet the market (the users) choose to use Slack over alternatives. If this lost productivity was a problem for the general market, Slack wouldn't have the market share it has.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#312

Post by int_19h »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #8
dexwiz wrote: post #2

No it probably won't end. No you are not a dinosaur, but development has changed. Decades ago you could build an app from the ground up. This gave you a bunch of different layers to compose, and probably made the app overall simpler. Now most developers are given a box to create their feature in whether it's a Spring Bean, a React Component, or a serverless function, with an entire application stack under it. You cou…

That's a great perspective, but are those peeps writing the unused frameworks just wasting their time to solve a question nobody has asked? Take the D language, it's basically a poor man's Java, with a shoddy garbage collector and aspirations at being C/C++... Is that the work of heroes or the misguided?

I don't even know what to respond to the last assertion, because it's "not even wrong".

Like, just about the only thing D has in common with Java is their shared C syntactic heritage, and an object model with single inheritance. But that also describes numerous other languages.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#313

Post by int_19h »

jabbany wrote: post #255
switchbak wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Qt is a mix of LGPL for the core, and GPL for some of the "value-add" modules (for which there's a commercial license available for those who can't live with GPL requirements).

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#314

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

The need for talented developers has vastly outpaced the supply. The bar has to be lowered to include a wider pool of people. There is currently no other solution for businesses.

The unfortunate side effect is that capable developers aren’t usually interested in solving simple problems inefficiently. So you won’t find them applying to your jobs.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#315

Post by int_19h »

dragonwriter wrote: post #199
randomdata wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTML/CSS/JS is literally a 10x improvement in iteration speed versus native. When you need to release your application across multiple platforms? Yes. Not much else even begins to compare on that front. Compared to native development on a single platform? Not even close. HTML/CSS/JS development is painfully slow in comparison.

> Compared to native development on a single platform? Not even close. HTML/CSS/JS development is painfully slow in comparison. I find it's often not, largely because the amount of focus on web apps means the native frameworks often are less productive by comparison than what is available for the web.

I'm still waiting for anything in HTML/JS land that's as productive as WPF.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#316

Post by xboxnolifes »

pc86 wrote: post #308
aemreunal wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Engineering without constraints is theory.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#317

Post by int_19h »

meetups323 wrote: post #111
SahAssar wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack, Spotify, Discord All those examples could or do work just as well as web apps, right? I don't think that's the authors message, but I'd rather have those type of apps be web-based instead of electron-based or native.

They are web apps... open.spotify.com, discord.com, app.slack.com. Even vscode.dev. The desktop product is just a repackaging of the web app with perhaps more OS integrations. If you don't want the OS integrations, use the web app. Some are available as a PWA too, which provides a nice middle ground.

At least for VSCode, it's the other way around - the app was first, and even if it was always an Electron app, it was still designed and written for the desktop. It actually took some time and effort to port that to vscode.dev, which wasn't there at the beginning.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#318

Post by int_19h »

jabbany wrote: post #263

What I don't get about the rant is why it matters what the "modern" way is. It's not like any of the old tools have disappeared right? If you don't like Electron/NW, nobody's stopping you from building native apps with Qt, GTK, or you can just draw your own UI raw! If you don't like frameworks with their own templating systems, maybe don't use them? I don't like them either! and yet rather than complain I just don't…

As a developer, that is correct.

As the end user of those "native" web-repackaged apps, the experience is just subpar. Give me back my native widgets and consistent UX.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#319

Post by int_19h »

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…

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

Because you also see things like https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/22900

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#320

Post by gmfawcett »

bmeski wrote: post #264
beebmam wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you think that is extreme language something is horribly wrong.

Well, you did refer to "vanilla JS" without a trigger warning. :P
Post reply on HN