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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#521

Post by marcus_holmes »

Ultimatt wrote: post #343
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…

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…

We see the same in other areas.

Desktop OS's are not appreciably faster now than they were 30 years ago, despite exponential rises in memory, storage and processor capacity. Better looking, yes, but not faster.

Games have maintained roughly the same performance for 20 years. However, the number of polygons has risen exponentially.

There's a minimum acceptable performance for most systems. If you exceed that, no-one cares (the extra performance is wasted). So every system hits that minimum performance level and spends the rest of the budget on appearance (or configurability, or ease of editing, or whatever).

Wordpress is slower than flat HTML. But the average web browser and connection is fast enough to serve Wordpress content in an acceptable time for the user. The "extra" budget was spent on making it easier to create the content.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#522

Post by indigochill »

mrweasel wrote: post #388
indigochill wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the market (the users) choose to use Slack over alternatives. If this lost productivity was a problem for the general market, Slack wouldn't have the market share it has.

But all the chat apps are Electron now, except Google chat, which is a PWA (I know, also available as an Electron app). There are no major native chat apps left to use as a reference.

I personally consider IRC (or I guess more precisely, IRC clients like Weechat (Not to be confused with China's WeChat)) a contender, as it provides chat functionality as well as the ability to create channels for themed discussions.

No, it doesn't have emojis or inline multimedia, but IMO it delivers the important part of chat and leaves the unimportant parts for other applications (like opening a hyperlink from IRC chat to see the clever meme someone posted). It also doesn't do video or voice, but there are other applications for that as well. For purely text chat, IRC is a lightweight (and self-hostable FOSS) solution.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#523

Post by wired_devil »

I think over time there were more use cases for everything. People still make sites with pure html and css (myself included) but that is not always the best way to do it. For example, take a complex admin control panel thing like AWS, it would be a nightmare to replicate that without a front-end framework. A really complex business logic made with a bunch of .php files? You would end up with a code base that is a mess and hard to maintain.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#524

Post by Mr_Yolokovich »

_xnmw wrote: post #427

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/Lara…

This is just the case. It is very difficult to know up-front if added complexity will actually save you anything in the end.

New concepts, frameworks or whatever are created for a reason. If you willingly adapt any new shine toy without thinking about what problem it solves you get what the author is ranting about: unnecessary complexity without any gains.

I think that the problem is that a great deal of knowledge (and good guesswork) is needed to make those decisions and even then it is hard.

Sometimes the removal of an unnecessary requirement will be the biggest factor in bringing the complexity down. But it is not often the case that this is obvious to the development team.

I do love to listen to how different companies solve problems from friends in the IT industry. Nobody is every on target in regards to "complexity used" vs "complexity actually needed"!

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#526

Post by goodpoint »

scotty79 wrote: post #232
goodpoint wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> drop their victim mentality and start putting their own ideas into practice How? Do you send pull requests to thousands of projects to delete their codebase?

Invest into your own super wonderful alternative and they'll crumble at mere sight of your engineering superiority. Or not.

Missing the point a bit? The author is in no way complaining about the lack of choice in web frameworks and similarly hyped up stuff.

He is complaining about unnecessary churn and unnecessary software and you obviously don't reduce it by writing even more stuff.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#527

Post by thiht »

drdec wrote: post #185
jcoletti wrote: post #30

"They constantly crash..." Putting aside the downsides and reasons not to use Electron, this statement is just false. They are not "constantly crashing." I currently use at least Figma, Insomnia, Slack, Spotify, and VS Code and these apps rarely crash, if ever.

VSCode never crashes for me. Slack crashes rarely for me. More often, it just becomes unusably slow. Spotify crashes multiple times a day on me. The music keeps playing however, so it's only an issue when I want to make a change. Is it possible to use the "windows" version of the Spotify electron client on Linux? That might make a difference since the Linux client is unsupported.

Nitpick: Spotify doesn’t use Electron but CEF.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#528

Post by wired_devil »

This things exist to solve "modern" problems, like the "inconvenience" of waiting 0.5s for your page to load. So you have to add a placeholder thing. But for that to be smooth, you need to have an SPA, and SSR. So you end up with a whole new approach, just to not see a blank page/appearing text for 0.3s.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#529

Post by norman784 »

martinald wrote: post #209
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 actually surprised either Microsoft, Slack or a new startup in the space haven't made a native app yet. Wouldn't even need to be all of them; Teams could be a native Windows app and keep the electron one for mac/linux/mobile. Or Slack could make a native Mac one first. Seems quite mad considering the use/value of the tools and the absolutely enormous user base they have.

Considering that in Mac you have universal app (so in theory your iOS app can easily become a Mac app), but they don't want, even they opt-out from the universal app program so you can't install the mobile app in the desktop.

But they didn't migrate because isn't critical for their business, Teams is just a bonus, but Outlook is 100% native app in Mac and works great, because they can't afford to lose customers with an electron version of Outlook.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#530

Post by andrew_ »

markdoubleyou wrote: post #321
andrew_ wrote: post #127

This entire post is peak boomer-meme. It's a rant because "new is bad." Heaven forbid they just stick with what they like and let everyone else churn. Their loves in native and PHP aren't going anywhere. Weird to see a "didn't have my coffee" moment make the front page.

Fair. Just realize that it'll happen to you (in 15 years you'll be raging, "goddammit, why does every UI require a 2 GB Roblox runtime") and go easy on the poor boomers. Circle of life.

Oh I'm already there. I'm 43 and have seen the "everything old is new again" cycle at least twice already. I'm just old school and don't need to air all of my gripes - I just let the youngs make mistakes we've already learned from.
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