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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?

#541

Post by JoeAltmaier »

argiopetech wrote: post #465
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The saying about optimization goes, "Time, Cost, Quality: Choose two." You've chosen the two that most profit-minded entities choose, but they are not the only choices. Optimizing for quality and time can be a winning solution, particularly if you can achieve novelty as well. Countless corporations and founders have had success with the strategy (Apple under Jobs comes to mind.) Optimizing for quality and cost is als…

Notice it's not the engineer doing the choosing in that optimization. You're asking the client to choose. Then you execute.

You can give any number of examples where time has a loose constraint.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#542

Post by aembleton »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #396
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 use both discord and slack in their website form. Am I missing anything by not downloading the electron apps?

I found I the needed Slack application for screen sharing; although might just be Firefox stopping it.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#543

Post by theon144 »

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…

>one sr front end dev who started doing $10 mn ARR [...] all by his lonesome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#544

Post by stnmtn »

mhitza wrote: post #383
jonny_eh wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking OAuth and SSO.

I don't think extending a server bot to support OAuth/SSO can be that hard.

Are you suggesting that a massive company should run their own IRC server, complete with bots that handle OAuth and access control, history saving, document downloading?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#545

Post by aembleton »

novok wrote: post #339
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…

IMO OS vendors could create an electron detection mechanism and start making electron instances use shared libraries and memory for their browser instances as part of a swap in the kernel. When you remove the "virtual OS container" that come with every electron app (their browser instance), you remove a significant amount of resource waste they have. Then they're pretty much QT apps written in python in the level of…

If the OS doesn't get updated, then some of those electron apps might stop working properly as they are expecting to target a particular version of Chromium.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#546

Post by dennis_jeeves »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#547

Post by mhitza »

stnmtn wrote: post #544
mhitza wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think extending a server bot to support OAuth/SSO can be that hard.

Are you suggesting that a massive company should run their own IRC server, complete with bots that handle OAuth and access control, history saving, document downloading?

I'm not suggesting anything really. If anything I'd be happier for even more asynchronous collaboration via email, and realtime chat available as an exception.

In the thread chain I was just curious why people think IRC could not be a Slack replacement.

Related to your question about these integration services.

Running an IRC server is definitely not complicated. Bots which implement authentication/authorization already exist (NickServ/ChanServ/X). History saving is also common, and for in-client message history a bouncer is a pretty good tool to have. Document downloading, you have DCC, or yet other bots you can query/download from (pretty common in the mp3 download era).

If there was incentive someone could create a bundled package that unifies all these different components + a more modern client interface and people would not have any issue using.

It's not in the problem space I'm interested to work on, but functionally even the more restricted existing IRC offering would be something I'd rather use than the gif meme filled, emoji overdosed chats I've had on Slack.

On the other hand, I've been an independent contractor for a couple of years now and I had the pleasure of not being part of large team slack channels anymore anyway.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#548

Post by StillBored »

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.

But, you then have all the problems with JS/HTML/CSS that web developers have. Like for example being able to support scroll bars and the like in a reasonable way. We accept certain poor behaviors from web apps because they are bound by a technology stack that is in many way sub optimal for the needs of the user.

I was employed doing what we called client server development in the 1990's, where we wrote the frontends the users interacted with in vb and later delphi. I would put the visual and operational complexity of some of those applications far beyond any slack/etc type application (one actually had a chat function built in). They were also distributed, but instead used proprietary protocols over proprietary wireless networks (until later when we were some of the first customers for cellular data). And I say it not to brag, but there were two of us working on the front end, both part time over the span of maybe 5 years. And we could do large logs/chat histories where the scrollbar reflected where in the data set the user was viewing and they could smoothly scroll or jump to any arbitrary location. I can't remember the last web application that could do something even that basic. Slack definitely cant. I'm pretty sure there are more developers working more hours on the slack front-end than we worked on those applications. So, I'm not sure where the claims of developer efficiency comes from.

People make a lot of claims about developer efficiency, but just about none of them are backed up by more than their gut instincts, which I would claim from the end user/3rd party viewpoint seem to be completely invalid. The apps are overwhelmingly poor on any number of fronts, and apparently have a lot of man hours poured into them.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#549

Post by lucideer »

omgitsabird wrote: post #331
lucideer wrote: post #227

This is a bad article, but it's a great example of why tech like Electron have succeeded. This article is a long boring rant with zero insights, in which the author never thinks to ask why ... > Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry? Has everyone except the "unix greybeards" gone mad!? ... ok he does use…

> 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.

I specifically said "large PHP applications" instead of just "PHP applications" because the difficulty is not in writing, it's in auditing and enforcing.

Even within templating libraries there are different levels of advancement around context-awareness: e.g. is still dangerous in languages like Twig, and is similarly challenging to audit. Alternatives like Latte mitigate this but even Twig is still a large degree easier to work with than vanilla PHP.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#550

Post by Joeri »

sascha_sl wrote: post #515
Joeri wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

Don't get me wrong. I deploy all my API's in docker containers as well, for similar reasons. But I do feel like a victim of stockholm syndrome whenever I think of docker as a solution instead of a workaround for problems self-imposed by our byzantine development tooling stacks. It is now even starting to make sense to run the entire suite of tools for local web development inside of a local docker container, because of the risk of subtle conflicts in devDependencies between machines. At what point are we going to concede this way of building software is madness? How many layers are too many layers?
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