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Is the madness ever going to end?

unixsheikh.com

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#401

Post by blub »

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…

Such web solutions are cheaper because the software market is really sick. There is almost no point in competing on quality and performance for consumer software, because some start-up with hundreds of millions of VC funding or some SW megacorp will enter the market and give their mediocre product away for free while paying engineers N times more than what you can offer. Bonus points if the software is at least partly open source or integrates with some standard (which will get nixed once they have enough market share).

And those VCs and that CEO won't be particularly concerned with technical excellence, they'll focus on their metrics regarding user acquisitions, market share, etc.

Since technical excellence is of at best secondary importance, it makes sense to commoditise the technology and make it as easy as possible to build such applications. Build some framework, give it away for free, ideally open source. Brag about how you're enriching the world through your open source contributions. Optionally snicker at the fact that you're in fact controlling how things get built on the so-called open web.

Relax on your yacht while drinking a good champagne. Don't explain to the poor sods still worrying their brains about technology why "the economics" prevent building quality software, because you don't give a fuck anyway. One of your employees or the employee of some other web company will surely set aside some time to clarify this, like the good little employee that they are.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#402

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

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

Magic.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#403

Post by blub »

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…

Let's not pretend that such business decisions are following rules written down on stone tablets passed from above. They're nothing more than going with the flow and following the path of least resistance in a market that painted itself into a corner of inefficiency and technical inferiority. Chiefly because of Google's empire building, VC money and the quest for millions of users.

Those two facets of quality, or the lack thereof in the applications which are being discussed are undeniable and the offence will continue to be perceived until the underlying problems are resolved.

Watching the rhetoric of the web dev community over the years, I have the impression that previously they thought that the one big technical improvement will come and that will allow them to compete on equal footing with native applications. Now they've given up and just mumble something about Electron being cheaper - an improvement, even if far from the ideal :-)

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#404

Post by emodendroket »

Stratoscope wrote: post #400
emodendroket wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

I would have guessed the memory consumption would be similar given the sandboxed tab model of Chrome. Anyway... even if not, do any of you guys really find that the memory consumption of Slack is a problem for you in practice?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#405

Post by teekert »

"Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry? Has everyone except the "unix greybeards" gone mad!?"

Well, I remember that I had to set up PHP and mess with php.ini, get nginx installed, php-fpm, get them talking and then I could install NextCloud which would complain a bunch about my nginx settings and time outs and url mappings etc.

Now that I have some "layers upon layers of complexity", I just add some completely understandable lines of "code" to a docker-compose.yaml file and boom. There I have it. I want to update? No more downloading, moving the old folder, extracting, then running occ, no, I just `docker-compose pull`, `docker-compose up -d`.

OP can rant al he/she wants because things aren't the way they used to anymore, but to me it just sounds kind of childish and tantrum-like. You can still do things the old way of you want, make a desktop native desktop app, make as many as you like. I also prefer them, but I can see the advantage of using the same tech for the web as for the desktop from the dev's point of view, so this is what we get. And I think a lot of complexity exists so that we can have infra as code, and that code is nicer if it is simple.

"All web servers have a built-in router. Whether it's NGINX, Apache, lighttpd, Caddy or something else. But no. Let's not use that; let's add yet another router on top of that with a single entry point and then basically re-write every single request before it gets served."

But have you tried Traefik? Just add some lines to your compose file and all your stuff has https, you want some basic auth? Add some lines. And we can put it all in git. It's much better imho than using every project's fav webserver and settings to do things. I cry when I think about the stuff I would have to configure without the layers of abstractions.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#406

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Comment fails to account for user perspective. As a user I do not want Electron nor React. It does not solve a problem for me, it creates a new one.^1 I would rather someone like UNIXSheikh make the "engineering" decisions.

1. I avoid both Electron and React. I like UNIX. Runs on many platforms.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#408

Post by emodendroket »

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…

Of course they are, because the user does not reward them for being sparing of resources that are, frankly, insignificant on modern devices. Might be different in you were operating in a market where people were largely relying on very low-powered devices, though.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#409

Post by the_gipsy »

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…

> the mayor of the town shows up out of the blue and says no, this direction is going to have a longer wait, I'm going to delay people intentionally, so that when they're stuck in traffic, sitting there, they'll have more of a chance to see signs/placards of, and contemplate patronizing, nearby businesses,

I knew it! Ha!

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#410

Post by gyulai »

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…

> hiring a few JS bootcampers to build one react UI that works on every platform is extremely cheap

But this is the point: Technological development could go in one of two directions: Allow skilled people to build increasingly bigger and better things, or allow increasingly low-skilled people to displace the skilled people by creating things that are worse but still vaguely fit-for-purpose. -- The industry is going the latter path, which is highly offensive to those skilled people.

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