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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#381

Post by pjmlp »

com2kid wrote: post #47
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". 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.…

Indeed, website it is.

That is the keyword here, website, no need to package it, I already have plenty of browsers installed.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#382

Post by pjmlp »

bmeski wrote: post #186
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 work on a massive CMS and he’s correct. There is an insane groupthink going on in webdev. Another team in my org has spent a year reinventing our client side js so that our templates are now mixed with the svelte runtime. All to render/update cards on the page that can update when an api pings the page. So 6 months later they’re still building the svelte integration and have only shipped 2 pages to users. This is a…

I know the feeling, specially bad now with the headless CMS fashion.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#384

Post by goto11 »

rahimiali wrote: post #356
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…

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.

> Ok. What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world?

Science fiction.

Somebody designs user interfaces for use in Hollywood movies. They don't have to be practical or even feasible, they just have to look cool.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#385

Post by goto11 »

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.

> Well it's a net negative for the end user

If it reduces cost, it is really a net negative? A lot of effort went into making the Apple II cheaper. Was that a "net negative" for the customer?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#386

Post by mrweasel »

emodendroket wrote: post #364
Stratoscope wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Chrome or Edge, you can take any web page and turn it into a standalone "app" that lives in the start menu and can be pinned to the taskbar and Alt-Tabbed to, etc. In the Chrome menu, select More Tools / Create Shortcut... and edit the title and check the Open as Window box. In Edge, select Apps / Install this site as an app. Edge has a lot more options here than Chrome. You can pin it to the Taskbar or Start, c…

I don't understand. What benefit does this have over running the app?

It ensures that when a website crash your browser or grinds everything to a halt, then it will take down the other “apps” as well.

That one of the reasons I don’t use the Google Chats PWA , when the browser misbehave, it will affact PWAs as well.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#387

Post by tryauuum »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #216
chrisco255 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers ultimately pay for engineering time, too.

it is an interesting point though. Like I've tried to think of elegant solutions where we can get the customer's browser to preprocess work for us so we can reduce our total lambda/ec2 time. for example one could have their browser generate the thumbnails for an uploaded photo instead of just uploading the single image upload. After all, 1000s to millions of browsers can make short work of something that might be hea…

Reminds me how in one online multiplayer game developers decided to offload the decision of "who's the winner of the match" to client machines. Because there were some problems on server side and they couldn't do it reliably there.

Developers said this voting system worked surprisingly well. Theoretically if there were >50 percent of malicious game clients they could all vote for a wrong player but this was hard to accomplish, it would require a coordination of randomly-matched players.

(eventually developers did fix server-side code and removed this system)

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#388

Post by mrweasel »

indigochill wrote: post #311
BeefWellington wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But all the chat apps are Electron now, except Google chat, which is a PWA (I know, also available as an Electron app).

There are no major native chat apps left to use as a reference.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#389

Post by goto11 »

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.

Realistically, the alternative to an Electron app is not native apps for multiple platforms. It is either a web app or a native app for a single platform.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#390

Post by johnny22 »

randomdata wrote: post #102
ramesh31 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why? Because in the time that OP spends tracking down segfaults and getting a dozen native libraries to compile for his native app, the JS dev has already finished XYZ feature. And because the environment is so high level, he can use the extra brain capacity for thing…

> 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.

i don't see why i'd ever spend time on any particular platform when i could avoid it. I don't like any of them, but i still want my software to work on them.
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