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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#511

Post by pydry »

moonchrome wrote: post #499
pydry wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I hear this argument a lot for e.g. why Slack is a dog slow electron beast. The thing is, slack has not been short of time OR money for at least the last 5 years. They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it. This "ivory tower" stuff smacks of just world/just market fallacy. I suspect there are deeper issues here. For example, vendor lock-in inhibiting comp…

>They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it. Example of such apps ? There should be plenty since it easily built.

Telegram? They have decent native messenging apps, I believe.

Or did you mean good desktop apps in general in which case where do I start...? There are thousands.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#512

Post by rsynnott »

> In the so-called modern day it's like everyone - except a few - has dropped their brain on the floor. They keep inventing "revolutionary new ways" of doing the exact same thing that could be done in a dozen ways already.

I mean, I think there are serious rose-tinted spectacles going on here. We don't tend to think as much of the horrors of the past as the javascript-y horrors of the present, but they were there. The worst excesses of OLE/ActiveX (1990-early noughties) spring to mind....

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#513

Post by omgitsabird »

vbezhenar wrote: post #484
omgitsabird wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he's never had to mitigate XSS vulnerabilities in large PHP applications. You can do this with ) ?>, where e is a function that escapes strings. Is this more work than writing {{ }}? I guess, but this is what your template library is doing under the hood anyway.

The question is not how mitigate vulnerability. Every vulnerability is trivially easy to mitigate. The question is whether it's easy to write vulnerable code. For PHP it's easy and implicit: For React it's hard and explicit:

While I agree with the overall point, these are different environments.

React normally operates in a DOM. It's templates are translated into javascript, and that javascript manipulates the DOM. PHP templates are just outputting strings.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#514

Post by torginus »

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…

I don't understand this. When I think of security people, I immediately think of articles where they describe how they made a timing attack which caused a race condition, which allowed them to overwrite the stack, and do arbitrary code execution via return-oriented-programming.

I'm reminded that these people exist and can routinely do stuff like this (or even more insane), and even though I've considered myself knowledgeable about this stuff, It makes me feel like the monkey looking at the monolith in 2001.

How do these folks become security experts?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#515

Post by sascha_sl »

Joeri wrote: post #498
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 have been in professional web development since 2004 and I mostly agree with the author that there are massive amounts of groupthink going on. "Modern" web development has standardized in tool stacks which are insanely complicated, far beyond anything that is warranted in most cases. We have forgotten how to make simple things in simple ways. At a minimum you need node, npm, webpack, babel, an spa framework, a fron…

"dockerized insanity" made me chuckle.

usually docker has resulted in a lot less debugging "works on my machine" issues, because unless you have patched your kernel in a really messy way it is impossible to not reproduce issues when testing in docker.

hell, I moved a startup-ish company single handedly from uploading PHP scripts to a "development server" (VM on a scuffy proxmox box in the closet) where they didn't even know if all the code was current and constantly stepped on each other's toes to a docker-compose.yaml, a Dockerfile and an A4 cheat sheet on how to use it (including resetting the database and such) in a week or so. it's an amazing tool to ensure consistency.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#516

Post by asmithmd1 »

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

"An engineer can do for a dime, what any idiot can do for a dollar" - Someone else

[edit] Achshually "An engineer can do for a dollar what any fool can do for two" - Arthur C. Wellington

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#517

Post by sergiomattei »

bmeski wrote: post #186
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 work on a massive CMS and he’s correct. There is an insane groupthink going on in webdev. Another team in my org has spent a year reinventing our client side js so that our templates are now mixed with the svelte runtime. All to render/update cards on the page that can update when an api pings the page. So 6 months later they’re still building the svelte integration and have only shipped 2 pages to users. This is a…

That's not evidence of groupthink in an industry, that's just an org making absurd engineering decisions.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#518

Post by donymemony »

It is surprising how the comment thread degenerates into a supposed market need, ignoring the issue.

Nothing new has been invented for the web since the JSF specification, all popular frameworks are copies of it, or its components. More than 10 years have passed and copies of this continue to be created.

And beyond the web:

Do we really need another Linux distro with deliberately obfuscated usage settings?

Does every application really need its own package manager with a new syntax?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#519

Post by norman784 »

n8cpdx wrote: post #75
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 can’t think of any reason not to use Slack exclusively as a website. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s a better experience IMO. For Teams, the only disadvantage is you can’t share your screen and video simultaneously when running as a tab; but I find the screen sharing experience to be better otherwise when running as a browser tab. Also: all of these “shitty” Electron apps work just as well on Linux as th…

I disagree, Teams in Linux (it might be on purpose) the app is way cut out, you can't request control (or was a few months ago), you can see less simultaneous videos at the same time (iirc was 2 or 4), so no, with the app you have almost zero advantages in Linux over the browser version.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#520

Post by narag »

arilotter wrote: post #35

> The entry barrier to programming needs to [be] high! I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I think the author's view that frameworks like Electron offer "no value over a native desktop application what so ever - well, perhaps with the only exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse." is missing the point that a "2-year-old baby" making something shiny you…

I also strongly disagree with the entry barrier thing.

But it's a false dicotomy. Simple solutions aren't inherently more difficult to master than complex ones. Actually, it's often the opposite.

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