Is the madness ever going to end? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#391

Post by Hasu » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:19 AM UTC

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.…

> OK so I wouldn't call React "stable", hopefully it has undergone its last major redesign for awhile (LOL), but there is tons of tooling for it.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. The last major feature addition to React was Hooks in 2018. But that didn't break stability at all - you can still use all of the old React APIs and ignore that Hooks exist entirely. The React team has actually been incredibly thoughtful about introducing new APIs, rarely break backwards compatibility, and it's a library I generally trust _not_ to break anything on updates.

If you work somewhere that insists on flavor of the month development using the shiniest libraries and the newest features, yeah, there's a lot of churn, but that's a very different complaint from "I wouldn't call React stable".

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#392

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:21 AM UTC

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…

also within time constraints, building an electron app in the scenario outlined is probably a lot quicker. Normally building something quicker implies that later maintainability is adversely affected, but in this case the tradeoff is not time vs. maintainability, but time vs. performance.

Performance has generally been getting the short end of the stick since early Windows days anyway when Gates had people build not for what a computer could handle when the application was built, but rather what it could handle a year down the road.

>When you build software, you're not given 10 years, a research team and infinite money.

So actually you don't need all that to identify when there is a bird in the picture anymore, what's the new bird in a picture requirement? https://xkcd.com/1425/

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#393

Post by blub » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:26 AM UTC

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've been critical of so-called web apps for quite a bit more than a decade now. It's not the hate that was pathological, it was the obsession of taking a platform designed for displaying documents and transforming it into an application distribution platform.

And after untold man hours and billions spent, the results are still inferior. That's where the "hate" is coming from. Seeing such an incredible waste while at the same time being lectured on the greatness of the web is intolerable for anyone that has seen what a quality piece of software looks and feels like.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#394

Post by widg3t » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:33 AM UTC

danesparza wrote: post #11

You have a misspelling in your second sentence. You also seemed to be focused on only web development. I would argue that "IT people" are not limited to web development -- and that you're overlooking the entire maker movement (including Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos), the breathtaking development going on with self-driving cars, and the development still taking place with AI. But as always -- follow the money. Old scho…

*its

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#395

Post by tonyedgecombe » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:34 AM UTC

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…

>Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#396

Post by andrei_says_ » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:35 AM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #55

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’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 use both discord and slack in their website form. Am I missing anything by not downloading the electron apps?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#397

Post by vbezhenar » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:41 AM UTC

I consider it an evolution. We blindly iterating over many possible variants, we try to mix languages, yes, we throw things on a wall and see what sticks. Some things do stick, other things will be replaced. It's a chaos, but it's getting better.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#398

Post by r_hoods_ghost » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:41 AM UTC

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 definitely empathise with the author. The web space is particularly prone to fashion driven development (FDD). Despite that I think he's a bit off the mark. Most consumer facing development isnt and has never been "engineering" outside of safety critical applications. It's more akin to domestic plumbing. You're connecting existing components together and while there's a skill to it, the skill ceiling isn't that high. Programming however (as opposed to development), even where software engineering does take place, is a craft. It's something that you learn by doing and it takes time to learn to do it well. Modern frameworks and software development techniques are often the equivalent to handing a complete amateur the keys to a fully equipped wood working shop, complete with laser cutters, CNC routers and a load of power tools and letting them have at it with only a few YouTube videos for guidance. Sure they'll be able to make things, and larger and more impressive things than if they could only use hand tools, but the resulting creations will be over engineered, or rickety, or just plain badly designed compared to furniture created by someone who's spent a few years apprenticed to a master craftsman. And you know what, that's fine. 99% of web development is still teenagers desperate to be the next Elon Musk hawking Tinder for marmosets to VCs, WordPress sites and e-commerce. It doesn't matter if it's a bit shit and is developed by people who learned their craft on Udemy and by watching 10 ways to turn yourself into a l33t programmer videos. The concerning thing is when that philosophy starts to infect areas where actual safety critical software engineering is done. No one wants a l33t programmer with massive scrum skillz designing the control system for a nuclear reactor...

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#399

Post by t-writescode » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:46 AM UTC

phist_mcgee wrote: post #376

whack wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ll just sit on the sidelines, taking hackily-written messes of software written under tight deadlines and performance improve the heck out of it and make my money being able to deliver that narrow area of value, thank you :)

Some of us “evolve” by becoming specialists.

Edit: and I’ll take backend code written by a skilled backend engineer and infra code written by a skilled dev ops person over all-of-it written by a “polyglot/front-end-dev-on-assignment” every day of the week. Just keep us away from the front end, we can’t make things pretty or interactive for garbage.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#400

Post by Stratoscope » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 7:47 AM UTC

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?

Some people in the thread said they preferred running Slack in a browser tab instead of the Electron app, perhaps to avoid the memory overhead of a separate browser instance.

The comment I replied to described a preference for the app because of OS navigation, e.g. Alt+Tab, a separate taskbar icon, etc.

This Chrome shortcut or Edge app trick lets you combine these approaches, running the website in your browser but giving the site its own main window that you can pin to the taskbar, set to auto-run, and navigate to like a native app.