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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#371

Post by razemio »

godDLL wrote: post #241
razemio wrote: post #69

I am going to ask and duck. What is a seriously good cross platform (yes also web) [meaning windows, Linux, Mac, Android, ios, web] alternative to electron? I used haxe 2/3 (openfl), javafx, qt. No they are not even close. Next thing what is bad about vscode? I really like this application as a prime example of perfect cross platform compatibility. It is also electron based. Just because 90% is shit (because it is fa…

Add raspi to your cross platform list. Now tell me how VScode runs. Kinda crap, is it not? Barely usable. And how do we fix that? We can't. I mean it's not a Commodore. It's a raspi. It streams 4K video and decodes it onto your projector on the fly. But editing code using a popular solution is not any good.

Funny that you mention this. I run it perfectly on my raspi 3 using code-server on home assistent. Now please tell me, what is a better IDE then vscode for a raspi 3? It barely uses any ram on the server side. Wouldn't it have been written in electron the code-server project would not be possible. Using a raspi not as a headless device when programming is a stretch. So the only IDEs that come to my mind are vim, emacs, eclipse Che, c9 and vscode. Would use vscode from this list, again not even close.

Now expanding this further, before code-server I had to use vnc, nomachine, x2go, ssh, mosh or xrdp to use an IDE on a remote server. None of these solutions are lightweight or stable across an unstable connection besides console based IDEs. Now I can finally write software as if the IDE would run on my rather old laptop while executing code on a very powerful server with minimal setup cost and barely any ram usage (compared to a full blown IDE).

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#372

Post by andrewjl »

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".

Cheaper sounds like something that is always the right thing to aim at, but it also constrains the product and the business around it to a model that has shrinking margins. That might be the best bet to make. It rarely results in durable businesses. Unless there's some other sort of moat in play.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#373

Post by weakfish »

userbinator wrote: post #261
clusterfish wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if E…

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.

No post body was provided.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#374

Post by Hermitian909 »

userbinator wrote: post #277
dtgriscom wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think there's already more than enough quantity

That's just not true though. People need so much software, I've written more than one mediocre electron app for niche use cases that saved users multiple hours a week of mind-numbing work. That software that they're so happy to have in their lives would still not exist if it weren't for electron.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#376

Post by phist_mcgee »

whack wrote: post #350
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 seem to notice this particularly often with a subset of developers. People who have a very strong "who moved my cheese" mindset. They are used to doing things a certain way. An approach that is simple to understand, but takes a very long time to get anything done. Ie, writing vanilla HTML without any frameworks. Besides, they aren't the ones paying for a team of developers, so they don't really see a downside in sp…

You've hit the nail on the head.

Greybeards now literally have grey beards. It must be hard to have pioneered software development, and watch it change under your feet at an escalating rate. I think the measures of a good engineer in the 80s/90s was more focused around 'hacker' culture. Speed, memory footprint, 'cleverness'.

These days, a good engineer can scale, be flexible, and is a polyglot. I think the goal posts have shifted for the old schoolers, and it may be just one of those things.

As they say, evolve or die.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#377

Post by Hermitian909 »

whack wrote: post #350
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 seem to notice this particularly often with a subset of developers. People who have a very strong "who moved my cheese" mindset. They are used to doing things a certain way. An approach that is simple to understand, but takes a very long time to get anything done. Ie, writing vanilla HTML without any frameworks. Besides, they aren't the ones paying for a team of developers, so they don't really see a downside in sp…

> And then all of a sudden, everything starts changing. Nobody wants to hire a vanilla JS/HTML developer anymore, they want react developers. And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time.

Don't want to support the author, but I want to say this has not been my experience. It seems to me that for most types of web pages web development is slower than in the old days. HTML and JQuery were really good for what were mostly static pages with a small amount of logic and state which is still what most web pages are.

However feature rich applications were a mess using older tools. Code organization was difficult and you had almost no hope of keeping complex state lined up in the UI, React has been a godsend for this kind of work.

But developers as a whole are very junior (iirc as of this year the median dev has 4 years of experience) and I think most can't pick which tools suit their use case.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#378

Post by pjmlp »

It is called fashion driven development, everyone looking for the latest fad in the hope to be the next keynote guest speaker at Conference XYZ, have the blog posts spotted on the technology news forum of the day, sell consultancy services, whatever.

Just like with some silly fashion decisions, the only cure is to wait that it gets taken by a new fashion wave that hopefully is less silly.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#379

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Maybe desktop Linux should get its act together to make a target that everyone else actually feels like targeting instead of grasping to the relevance of someone dropping Electron bombs as the true path to happiness, or emulating Windows games for that matter.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#380

Post by 5sp »

zrm wrote: post #358
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 th…

not with Steve's dead.
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