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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#501

Post by throw0101a »

ahartmetz wrote: post #466
mbell wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With different constraints... "The perfect race car crosses the finish line first and then completely disintegrates" - Ferdinand Porsche (I took some liberty with the translation - the idea is that everything breaks at the same time.)

"The perfect racing car crosses the finish line first and subsequently falls into its component parts." ?

* https://quotefancy.com/quote/1791488/Ferdinand-Porsche-The-p...

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#502

Post by kevincox »

cercatrova wrote: post #146
Pxtl wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kinda hopeful that Maui+Blazor will eventually let us have our cake and eat it too - instead of "everything is web", do "everything is a desktop-style gui framework" including the web. Although AFAIK they don't even have a web renderer on the horizon right now - purely desktop+mobile. Of course, there will be angry PMs and designers that will be upset that their website looks like it was spat out of a desktop GUI…

Isn't that basically what Flutter does? In my experience, it works well enough for mobile, although you still have people saying it's not "native enough." It's less stable on web and desktop though but it works.

Flutter on web is basically unusable for anything that involves text or links. The browser has so much native functionality here that trying to reimplement it is futile.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#503

Post by [deleted] »

dilyevsky wrote: post #485
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #477

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'…

Don’t blame the player… The reason this happens is not the salaries but bc it is rewarded by hiring and management practices.

[deleted]

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#504

Post by pmlnr »

dexwiz wrote: post #2

No it probably won't end. No you are not a dinosaur, but development has changed. Decades ago you could build an app from the ground up. This gave you a bunch of different layers to compose, and probably made the app overall simpler. Now most developers are given a box to create their feature in whether it's a Spring Bean, a React Component, or a serverless function, with an entire application stack under it. You cou…

> At the end of the day, naked tech has no value. It's only the end-user features that make money.

value != money

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#505

Post by Dowwie »

> In the past IT people, whether we're talking about programmers or something else, were very clever people. People with a high level of intelligence that took serious pride in doing things in a meaningful and pragmatic way.

This is true. They were exceptional, and there were far fewer of them. They worked in organizations that tightly controlled intellectual property and don't share their source or methodologies for free with the world. Some of these people had an issue with the barriers to entry and did something about it, democratizing access. They did crazy things like open source their work and evangelize an open source ethos. They created more accessible programming languages. They created frameworks based on methodologies that they learned the hard way. They changed the world.

After a solid 25 year run of it, we are in a period of great technological abundance built on sharing knowledge and technologies. There is so much available now. Yet, we are in the infancy stage of developments that can barely be imagined. Whatever seems like madness now is nothing compared to what is to come. More languages. More frameworks. More ways to solve the same old problems. More abstractions built on abstractions built on abstractions. And, occasionally, there will be force multipliers.

As I write this, I feel energized, not demoralized, about where we are and where we are heading.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#506

Post by Subsentient »

spuz wrote: post #457
Subsentient wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be partly true, Electron inherently attracts low-skilled, incompetent programmers due to its 'easiness', while in reality JS isn't that much easier than, say, Python. Not only do you have to deal with dumber programmers writing the code, but what people forget is that CPU and RAM usage isn't just some metric you see in htop or Task Manager. Electron apps are much slower than native apps at doing almost…

> If you write any application in "native" widgets for the host OS, shame on you. That is definitely the wrong way to do things in almost every case nowadays Could you elaborate on that? Isn't using the native GUI API of the OS a relatively sensible default, especially if you aren't targeting multiple OSes? If you definitely want cross-platform support, I can see the argument for choosing one of the cross-platform fr…

I suppose for OS utilities targeting a specific platform only, that makes sense. But for portability, you sure as shit shouldn't be trying to write a custom GUI using the native OS GUI toolkit for all three platforms. It's surprising how many make this mistake. It's like they've never heard of Qt and are surprised development takes forever.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#507

Post by anovikov »

This is all done for the sake of higher speed of development. Building a native app in Qt will take a lot more time compared to an Electron equivalent, same goes for React Native vs Objective C mobile app.

I get to think the reason is competition. Your Qt app may run 4x faster taking 3x less memory, but i will build my Electron app first, eat the market, racing to the exit before yours gets released (and yes this also explains why nearly every software product we use is such a trash - the ones that aren't trash never got past MVP because trashier ones were out of the door first, and got funded).

This is a problem but i can't see any solutions to it. It is the nature of industry itself.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#508

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

gabeio wrote: post #352
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can get behind the idea that lowering barriers to entry is a good idea, I don't think that's the same thing as tolerating ludicrously slow garbage tools just because everyone insist on either developing like a baby or only hiring babies. As an industry, we should be deeply ashamed at how much of the world's time and resources are wasted running poor software so a company can save a few bucks.

> As an industry, we should be deeply ashamed at how much of the world's time and resources are wasted running poor software so a company can save a few bucks. This seems like you are saying everyone should write in assembly or c language for ever task possible, since that's the only way to avoid "wasting the worlds resources running poor software". At some point the trade offs are not solely "so that a company can s…

> This seems like you are saying everyone should write in assembly or c language for ever task possible, since that's the only way to avoid "wasting the worlds resources running poor software".

No. Look, computers today are many orders of magnitude faster and more powerful than they once were but our software still takes measurable seconds to do simple tasks. That's not 'oh, my software could be a bit more optimal' level of slow, that's 'I built my software like a Rube Goldberg machine made of garbage' slow.

> but at what point are you allowed to stop focusing on saving a few KB of ram or CPU cycles and focus on actually getting things done?

If it were only a few KB of RAM and a few dozen CPU cycles we wouldn't even be having this conversation! We live in a world where people seem to think a chat program using a GB of memory is acceptable. That's just insane.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#509

Post by torginus »

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 the underlying explanation for this is that the world sucks. Most of the companies that are commonly thought of as tech companies aren't.

My definition of a tech company is a company that lives and dies by the quality of technology they make. For example Nvidia is a tech company. If someone made GPUs that are half the price, but twice as fast, Nvidia would be out of business in a jiffy.

Spotify isn't a tech company - if someone made a better music player, they wouldn't be able to disrupt Spotify, unless they somehow managed to make a deal with every record label under the sun.

In the 2000s, I had a 20GB Music folder full of music I liked, and I played them using Winamp, which supported searching my library as fast as I could type. It didn't have all of Spotify's features, but the it did the core value proposition of playing music better than Spotify does today imo.

The problem is that Spotify is a package deal - if you like the service, then you must use the client - and they are under no competitive pressure to make a better one.

The 'it's much cheaper' argument is ridiculous - it's not that hard to create a native app that plays music - I doubt the people who wrote Winamp commanded the salaries FAANG people writing Electron apps do today.

'Tech' companies make much more money today than when they were making when they were writing native stuff.

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