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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#411

Post by cblconfederate »

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 experienced desktop application devs to build a quality native app for each platform is going to be expensive,

So it looks like software would vastly improve if silicon valley companies moved to india or russia or some other place with abundant supply of capable developers.

Regardless, what you said doesnt show that it was a strawman, it was still a valid conclusion, but you re offering the real reason behind it.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#412

Post by _xnmw »

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'm a webdev, I've done nothing but full-stack web development for the past 10 years, and I mostly agree with this guy. I hate Electron garbage, the slowness is infuriating. I hate SPAs and React, it's unnecessary abstraction overhead in 90% of the projects I've seen it used in. The only thing I don't agree with him about is PHP, because the benefits provided by abstracting routing and templating into a "proper" framework like Laravel are well worth the performance tradeoffs, which can be mitigated later by using cachers like Swoole and OPCache.

> all these successful companies making billions of dollars and attracting top talent are just throwing money into a fire for fun

Huge bureaucracies waste billions of dollars doing things which a single dedicated programmer could do, or small scrappy teams can do better. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is the whole reason by YCombinator exists: because startups can "disrupt" an industry.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#413

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#414

Post by jlengrand »

I'm on both sides with this one.

I feel like someone could have written the same 10 years ago. "But why do we need something so inefficient as Python, we have C that does the job and is much faster". "GUIs? Such a waste of resources, CLIs do the job just fine and you go faster with it!"

At the same time, I'm also personally quite bored with the sheer amount of complexity we seem to put in everything those days. Layers of frameworks on top of frameworks, especially for simple projects. My friends who followed bootcamps lately learn React, not Web Dev. That is a problem IMHO in the Long run.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#415

Post by martneumann »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #395
zrm wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From my experience, these Microsoft frameworks never really get picked up by larger parts of the community.

I feel like Microsoft's approach is to create a framework for everything and hope it sticks - though they appear to repeatedly fail. Nobody really used Xamarin. Nobody is using Blazor.

This very minimal documentation of Maui doesn't really scream confidence in their own product, either. I predict this one will die as well.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#416

Post by muskmusk »

> Programming is engineering; it's not something where you throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks and just assume that programming languages, browsers, and operating systems are made of magical dust.

This is the mistake, web/desktop app programming is exactly a place where you throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It does not matter how great your app is if no one is using it. Conversely if your app is successful you can always pay someone a ludicrous amount of money to fix it, software is nice like that.

Databases and operating systems are a completely different beast. In those domains things get so complex that proper engineering is essential and in those areas you also tend to find "better" engineers. But web and desktop applications is like building tool-sheds, engineering rigor is irrelevant. It matters when you build sky scrapers though.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#417

Post by fgkramer »

jlengrand wrote: post #414

I'm on both sides with this one. I feel like someone could have written the same 10 years ago. "But why do we need something so inefficient as Python, we have C that does the job and is much faster". "GUIs? Such a waste of resources, CLIs do the job just fine and you go faster with it!" At the same time, I'm also personally quite bored with the sheer amount of complexity we seem to put in everything those days. Layer…

Getting a job straight out of a bootcamp is hard. Getting a front-end job out of a bootcamp without knowing the most popular technologies is even harder.

Bootcamp's interest will always be to increase their students odds to be hired rather than foundational knowledge

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#419

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

> perhaps with the only exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse.

True, and the author highlights the benefit himself.

Maybe there is an underlying truth here as the number of users isn't indicative of quality and they might be successful if implemented differently.

Apps like Teams are a severe resource hog, software is getting slower even if machines improve. I use electron myself for visualization, but I know it is not the optimal choice.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#420

Post by bodge5000 »

As others have pointed out, its a strawman post, and the arguments being made in favour of what he is against aren't what he is saying they are.

However, I thought the more interesting to address would be

> There is something seriously wrong with the IT industry...

I think you'll find the same case whenever you get close enough to any industry, but don't agree with the general consensus. From afar, most industries, including IT, seem to be well organised and know what they're doing. Its only when you get into the weeds with them you see the chaos surrounding it.

Case in point, music. I've been playing around with synthesizers for the past few years as something a bit different from programming. But as I've got closer, I've come to see that simple problems often have inane solutions, where things that you thought one box could do on its own have to be handled by 10, all plugged into each other with different cables and in a different order.

So yeh, I'd say this is just a natural consequence of being in the industry. Talking to friends in completely different industries, I don't think this is unique to IT at all

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