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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?

#421

Post by dachryn »

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…

and thats exactly his problem. Its about dumbifying the development cycle, with often terrible results for the end-user. Its a race to the bottom about 'how low can we go' and 'what will our users tolerate'.

Not all Electron apps are bad, but thats because they are still doing a ton of work to actually make it a little bit smoother. But this is in spite of Electron, not thanks to Electron.

Its a race to mediocrity on every platform

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#423

Post by diordiderot »

mbell wrote: post #329
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…

"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands." - Someone

Brilliant!

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#424

Post by dachryn »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #303
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…

Its best to understand early that an Engineer deals in two commodities: money and time. Their job is not to create ivory-tower ideal solutions. The whole problem, the reason Engineers exists, is to manage technology such that the constraints of money and time can be met.

yeah but the problem is: which budget are you optimizing? That of the company of course. You offload a lot of bullcrap onto the end user. Like the author said, wasting electricity and battery life and thousands of devices just because you cant be bothered to generate html on the server to serve simple text is a common thing for news sites.

This is wasting the time as well of the end user, because its slower to load, and lower performant on the device itself

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#425

Post by dachryn »

dragonwriter wrote: post #174
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’m very critical when a company like Slack cannot find the time and resources to make native clients. It's not a matter of finding resources, it's a matter of finding that to be the best use of resources. Obviously they could have native apps for major desktop platforms with the energy put into the Electron app, and performance would probably be better, but would they have feature parity? And if you increase the r…

I agree Electron is a great way to serve tons of end users. But lets not exaggerate, there are 4 main systems to target: iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. Its not that insane to have 4 well optimized applications, instead of 1 mediocre-fits-all approach.

The problem is more recruitment and internal mobility I guess. If you have 4 teams, experts in their domains, you will have 4 teams 'fighting' each other over the UI, working in their silo's, harder to maintain feature parity... But thats organisational.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#426

Post by dachryn »

martneumann wrote: post #415
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This so much. Google gets a lot of critique for killing of its products, but Microsoft does the same in the developer community. Except they don't even have the decency to properly announce it when they consider something abandonware

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#427

Post by _xnmw »

Some abstractions are worth it, some are madness. The only way to know for sure is to actually try it, and gain years of experience in a particular paradigm.

I built my first raw PHP and vanilla JS web application SaaS about 15 years ago. Some things have changed for the better since then, and some for the worse. Since then I've seen hundreds of frameworks, ideas, concepts come and go. Some of them, like Symfony/Laravel are a godsend which made my development much faster and easier. Other ideas, like React/Angular are unnecessary piles of complexity which add little value to the customer. I maintained a large Angular 2 app in production for several years, and after that built a startup on React, then I decided frontend JS frameworks and SPAs simply weren't worth the effort. Went back to HTML-only and a little vanilla JS, and the result was absolutely refreshing -- far less complexity, and the users can't tell the difference (it's actually faster and MORE reactive than most react-crap apps built these days). But I wouldn't go back to raw PHP, the abstraction layer that Laravel provides is well worth the performance tradeoff.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#428

Post by patkai »

"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"

Actually, it is - and he just described evolution. And for the record, I don't like it, but what can I do. Would like to go to the cathedral, but I'm stuck in the bazaar.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#429

Post by MrDresden »

Like has been mentioned here already, its due to cost cutting.

JS Bootcamp graduates are easy to find and employ for relatively cheap. Experienced developers (no matter if self taught skills or classically trained) are fewer and cost more.

So most of the new and shiny tools and apps are broken on arrival, and often stay that way for a long time (MS Teams is for instance awful to use even to this day).

However there are plenty of wonderful applications out there that aren't being written haphazardly but rather by professionals that care about quality and stability.

The author should just select the tools he wants to use, and stay away from the rest. It is what I do.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#430

Post by ramoz »

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…

The most insane, time consuming, abstractions I’ve written have been on the front end. Esp w/ React, since exhausting abstractions is basically a requirement for any large/complex app.
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