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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#351

Post by grishka »

n8cpdx wrote: post #75
Waterluvian wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m very critical when a company like Slack cannot find the time and resources to make native clients. I’m so #%^*ing tired of it taking three Mississippis to show a channel I click on. But on the whole, I don’t think the armchair critics truly appreciate how Electron reduces the cost by at least an order of magnitude. It’s a brilliant tool for shipping early and fast. My only criticism with these start-up use cases…

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…

I use Discord in a browser tab. Much better than the app. Loads instantly and reuses the one instance of Chromium I'm always running anyway.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#352

Post by gabeio »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #228
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…

While I can get behind the idea that lowering barriers to entry is a good idea, I don't think that's the same thing as tolerating ludicrously slow garbage tools just because everyone insist on either developing like a baby or only hiring babies. As an industry, we should be deeply ashamed at how much of the world's time and resources are wasted running poor software so a company can save a few bucks.

> As an industry, we should be deeply ashamed at how much of the world's time and resources are wasted running poor software so a company can save a few bucks.

This seems like you are saying everyone should write in assembly or c language for ever task possible, since that's the only way to avoid "wasting the worlds resources running poor software". At some point the trade offs are not solely "so that a company can save a few bucks", the trade offs also are things like "why spend 1 year writing a simple server which I can write a far superior server in say python/go/etc. in a few minutes". Yes, I understand you may be more specifically talking about Electron here, but at what point are you allowed to stop focusing on saving a few KB of ram or CPU cycles and focus on actually getting things done? Feeling productive? More platforms?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#353

Post by coliveira »

Ultimatt wrote: post #343
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…

Feels like everyone is very disinterested in the cost to the user with most "modern ways" of doing things. Many webpages use far too much resource to just communicate text. Web adverts are especially awful for this. I could browse the web with dialup and a machine a thousandth as powerful as my phone. So as a consumer why do I need to "upgrade" what was the added value above Google scale is delivering computationally…

But the cost to the user is not considered, even in the real world. For example, transportation decisions are made in the airline industry, and they rarely consider how much this will financially impact the lives of passengers. The same pattern is replicated everywhere: companies work to maximize their profits, while their clients have to deal with possible financial losses.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#354

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

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…

I wouldn’t be surprised if solving the problem with the Mayors constraints increased costs though.

I have a few stories where senior management, or a preferred developer had some pet project. Or crazy ideology. So we adopted that dispute protests. If we picked a standard way we would have been done faster, cheaper and with fewer bugs.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#355

Post by deft »

kelnos wrote: post #333
deft wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack isn't feature complete in their webapp if they even still have it. vscode.dev is new, the app existed for a long time. In practice, its the reverse; it allows you to turn an app into a website and add yet another supported platform.

> Slack isn't feature complete in their webapp if they even still have it. It isn't? I use it daily and haven't noticed anything missing, except that voice calls don't work on Firefox, which is fine, because I never use them.

It isn't, except it is. lol.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#356

Post by rahimiali »

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…

Ok. What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? I’d like to use the products from that discipline.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#357

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

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…

That's because Windows, Mac and all 1000 versions of Linux are intentionally incompatible silos. The only thing common is a standardized Web platform.

"Hello World" shouldn't take 115 mb and trillion computer cycles, period.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#358

Post by zrm »

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…

We can kind of see how this happened.

There are multiple platforms and nobody wants to write a separate app for each one. So now you need a framework to make apps multi-platform.

Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this. They have the most market share. Before Electron existed, people would just write native apps for Windows and nothing else, locking people into Microsoft.

Apple has resources, they have the right incentive because they don't have dominant market share on desktop, but they're obsessed with native look and feel. Cross platform frameworks are antithetical to that, so they don't do it.

That leaves the Linux people. So we get Qt. Finally something that works. Except that this is the opposite of what the Linux people are good at. It's not "do one thing do it well," it's reimplementing the equivalent of an entire operating system's APIs on at least three different operating systems. That's a lot of work, it's hard to do right and easy to get wrong, and they don't have a mountain of cash behind them. So it works but it's full of sharp edges.

Enter Electron. Browsers had to deal with the same multi-platform nonsense but Google does have a mountain of cash so it's easier to use. Winner, efficiency be damned.

What might have worked if anybody there thought of it would be for Apple to port their native APIs to Windows (because it has the most market share) and Linux (because it's a fellow Unix-like so that should be pretty easy). Then you could easily compile native macOS applications for other platforms but they would still be native on macOS. That solves their problem because now everybody is going to target their native API, and if they run less well on Windows, that's fine as long as they run at least as well as Electron does. Big win for them because now that becomes the target and they're the only ones with true native applications.

But is modern Apple smart enough to do that?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#360

Post by emodendroket »

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…

Is it really the best "pure engineering" decision to make like 10 clients instead of one Web application?
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