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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?

#471

Post by panxyh »

_moof wrote: post #435
Ultimatt wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If we designed aircraft the way we design consumer software nowadays, every plane would have sixteen rocket engines and two seats.

Except that we'd want to fly that.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#472

Post by vbezhenar »

jabbany wrote: post #263

What I don't get about the rant is why it matters what the "modern" way is. It's not like any of the old tools have disappeared right? If you don't like Electron/NW, nobody's stopping you from building native apps with Qt, GTK, or you can just draw your own UI raw! If you don't like frameworks with their own templating systems, maybe don't use them? I don't like them either! and yet rather than complain I just don't…

Responsibility stops me from building applications and services using obscure tools or writing my own tools. Because it'll be rewritten by later developers using commonly-used tools. There's certain expectations. You don't write your own logger library in Java, you're using logback or log4j (despite them being monstrosities). You don't write your own framework or use some obscure framework like Helidon. You use Spring Boot because everyone uses that. If you'll write your GUI application using Gtk, it's likely to be rewritten with Electron just after you leave the company and next developers will not be able to speak C because they just finished some JS bootcamp and just went into industry.

I can use assembly language for my own projects if I want. Nobody cares. But for code that I was hired to write, I'll use most appropriate approach and usually that's a most popular approach. Even if I'd love to just write some SQL, I'll bring Hibernate and meddle with its configurations because that's what everyone uses and knows (and hates) in Java. That'll produce maintainable software that won't get rewritten tomorrow because you used arcane tech nobody understands.

Using non-conventional approaches might be good for job security, though, I guess.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#473

Post by anthk »

sofixa wrote: post #340
StillBored wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Compared to what? Java? Have you used c#.net, or for that matter Delphi or VB6 in their heydays? To me, I look at electron and I would put it roughly on par with QT. Although, like the vb vs delphi argument, i think electron gives you a good initial boostrap and makes you feel product…

There's still a huge advantage for Electron - it's still fundamentally the same tech underneath - HTML, CSS, JS. Any semi-competent web developer can use Electron and ship cross-platform apps with it, and heck, lots of code can be shared between Electron apps and the web "app". None of the other options provide these facilities.

QT is much faster than Electron.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#474

Post by fxtentacle »

ninjaa wrote: post #79
caymanjim wrote: post #48

I'm a greybeard. I've been doing this since before HTML existed, and I've kept up with the changes as they occurred along the way. I'm not going to refute the author's points one by one. Everything being complained about exists for a reason. I agree that it's incredibly complex. It's overwhelming. That's why people specialize. An individual can still own an entire application and infrastructure, limit their technolog…

And then there's one sr front end dev who started doing $10 mn ARR with a web app and react-native apps for iOS and Android from a Next.js monorepo all by his lonesome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lnbdRweJtA&t=432s I really think the React-Native and Next.JS (and tRPC and Prisma and GQL) have hit a PHP-style tipping point where we are going to see a great new flowering of cross platform web and mobile apps (last…

The key here is that for his business problem, the technology used is completely irrelevant.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#475

Post by Jetrel »

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 thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. It's vastly, vastly easier to develop a really good, clean app, with a great UI in it — especially a UI that needs lots of unique, new components that aren't in an OS-level GUI api's standard set. You compare really well-built electron apps (VSCode, Discord) with their competition, and it's such a staggering, one-sided comparison in "fit and finish", attention to detail, and not having weird little bugs that never get fixed. I say this as a former OS partisan, but even Apple, previously the trophy-holder for "best gui-builder tools", is way behind the curve. Steam, too, is now an electron app.

The thing that's just the brutal nail in the coffin is — if it just had the attributes mentioned above, it'd be a huge win. But to have "nearly perfect cross-platform support out of the box with no effort?" Jesus.

The thing about electron is — some 5 years from now, we're likely to start shipping electron apps that run on WebASM rather than JS, and at that point, there won't be any valid counterargument. They'll have all the benefits, and run just as fast and lean. Game over.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#476

Post by thfuran »

panxyh wrote: post #471
_moof wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we designed aircraft the way we design consumer software nowadays, every plane would have sixteen rocket engines and two seats.

Except that we'd want to fly that.

Well, nine of the engines are pointed forwards.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#477

Post by zaptheimpaler »

Its a good rant, even if some of the details are wrong. I think what he's really getting at is just that software is flooded with bad developers. Its only become more true as salaries go up and everyone flocks to the field.

By bad I DON'T mean junior or inexperienced. Bad is someone who really doesn't have any intrinsic motivation or drive to improve their craft, or worse doesn't care how it impacts the world - they're in it exclusively for the money. It really sucks working with people like that. Like this is literally what this entire stupid orange website used to cheer for 10 years ago when recruitment and VCs all talked about hiring for passion, its why github contributions and side projects and an interest in tech were valuable signals before they became another metric to be gamed.

Tech really does seem to be increasingly full of mercenary types now. People who give 0 fucks about ethics or integrity. Don't care what their employer does, don't care about their craft, don't care about working multiple jobs in secret. Just robots you put a coin in and turn the crank to get some code out. Github Copilot has admitted to using all Github code, regardless of license. Mass theft. But some robots built that because they were paid enough.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#479

Post by gwillz »

Jetrel wrote: post #475
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 thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. It's vastly, vastly easier to develop a really good, clean app, with a great UI in it — especially a UI that needs lots of unique, new components that aren't in an OS-level GUI api's standard set. You compare really well-built electron apps (VSCode, Discord) with their competition, and it's suc…

I'd argue that Steam isn't 'now' an electron app but was the OG 'electron' app. The store and community interface have always been web UI from day one.

Originally it wrapped the IE/trident engine and then transitioned to chromium.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#480

Post by DoingIsLearning »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #326
moralestapia wrote: post #293

I had a meeting today with a "cybersecurity expert" who was consulting a big company that had no idea what a hash function was. Literally no idea, as in "never heard the term before". I explained the concept to her and she started referring to it as "encryption", I told her it wasn't encryption and she immediately started to debate me about that. Let that sink for a bit, she really thought she knew more than me about…

security folks sometimes dont realize the connection between Hash functions (for data structures) and Cryptographic Hashing (aka digest) functions. Perhaps that was the confusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function

No I have definitely seen people with fancy titles around data security and now also GDPR 'specialists/consultants', who lack the most basic CS knowledge, sometimes coming from other fields like business and administration.

People will chase opportunities wherever they find them, if you have a good network and managers who are as clueless as you then you can absolutely fake it till you sort of make it (in large enough corps).

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