Is the madness ever going to end? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#551

Post by StillBored » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 3:44 PM UTC

ihateolives wrote: post #462

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…

Last time I looked at Lazarus its autocomplete/suggestion was not on par that I've become to expect from VSC/Intellij and modern languages. Also, who wants to write things in FP nowadays? I was toying with the idea, but I don't want to end up abandoning my project midway just because FP happens to miss an important library or db driver or something else.

The pascal thing has its own advantages/disadvantages. Finding people with pascal experience is going to be difficult, but i'm not sure this is really any worse than some of the web/framework wars. Pick a framework and likely in 5 years your going to have problems finding people who are experts in it because they have all moved to something else (although maybe that is settling down angular/react are still around). OTOH, Pascal is a far simpler language than JS, for sure it has fewer gochas than JS does at this point, and it supports proper threading if you happen to need that among other things. Its definitely stagnated, but that's probably a good thing if you plan on building a long term business around it. I'm not sure I would consider editor features like auto completion very high on my technology selection, particularly since you can 1. fix it, 2. use a different editor.

I would worry about hidpi support with Lazarus, and how well the android/ios/mac bindings actually work. Maybe a few other things too, basically things that are going to be so large a work item that fixing them is going to outweigh any advantages of picking the tool. I think electron has at least a dozen of these, and that would push me away from it. From where I stand, electron is closer to java in the long term results.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#552

Post by WhyNotHugo » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #221

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 that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to comp…

> [...] usually have a "right answer" from an engineering standpoint, which as you can imagine, has to do with maximizing traffic throughput and/or minimizing delays to each individual vehicle [...]

Another common problem is when an Engineer is told to maximise a specific variable, rather than apply their wisdom to determine _which_ variable to optimise.

Optimising for more cars usually means that public transport can't improve, and moving around gets worse for pedestrian/bikes. Ultimately, mobility does not improve, and you just need more cars and more car lanes. Car flow improves, but nobody stops to think if that's really the most important thing to improve.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#553

Post by dilyevsky » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:11 PM UTC

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #489

dilyevsky wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I do blame the player. "Dont blame the player" is a bullshit copout. Players are all there is. If no one builds evil shit, it simply doesn't get built. People who either learn to sometimes put their self-interest below something bigger or robots who are easily bought. Concretely, candidates can choose not to enter a field they are uninterested in or make an effort to develop an interest, and managers can design hirin…

This attitude achieves nothing but quickly becoming that guy as far as peers and management are concerned (assuming you can even get through the door to begin with)

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#554

Post by jrm4 » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

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 mean, you named the precious few that don't suck, and two of them do essentially the same thing, and the other is a music player with a very questionable business model.

I'm with the op. I'm deeply unimpressed with the last decade or so of software development; and that's not just blowing smoke -- this is day to day practice. With the exception of Discord, I deliberately take pains to use old software because it's better.

Moreover, I find when I show non-tech folk "how I do things with old software," most want to learn more, and nearly none are satisfied with what they are "given."

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#555

Post by zerotolerance » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #221

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 that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to comp…

Engineering a product without taking business context into account is not great engineering.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#556

Post by tanseydavid » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #494

jack_pp wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So once you have an app up and running, with millions of satisfied users you would hire another team of more expensive developers to build a native app.. for each platform? so make that 2 more teams or rather 4 more teams? (iOS, Mac, Android, Windows)

They're a $24 billion company. Hiring 4 small teams probably shouldnt be too much for them.

...and one PM to manage all 4 teams and ensure that there is no feature-drift between the various OS-target versions.

I am really just trying to emphasize that there are tradeoffs lurking everywhere and they are often hidden by assumptions.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#557

Post by dang » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

bmeski wrote: post #169

clusterfish wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if E…

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#558

Post by tluyben2 » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

aemreunal wrote: post #302

rdiddly wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to comp…

> 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…

But you can do this satisfying requirements with different interpretations: here in HN we cry and whine when database queries are not efficient, when code is suboptimal, when sites are hacked and leak info and many more things. These things were all probably fine within the requirements. Just like this crap experience for the user with Electron. So where do I draw the line? And why?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#559

Post by chipotle_coyote » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

buu700 wrote: post #240

bunnythefifth wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would not normally be quite so much of a jerk about the numerous syntax errors, except that this ends with a suggestion that people, you know, pay for this writing. I don't expect perfection (God knows I make tpyos all the time), but the closing paragraph starts with a sentence that literally has no verb. Are you really bashing the author for imperfect English? The about page clearly mentions that they are not a…

Was about to note the same thing. Agreed with GP on all other points, but I forgave the language mistakes after seeing their about page. FWIW, while I don't condone it, I do think that any non-native speaker should take such criticism as a compliment. It's a sign that they're good enough to pass for native; if they were clearly struggling to write passable English, the reactions would likely be more polite with helpf…

Coming back hours later, I'm going to be a bit harsher on myself: if I had checked the about page, I'd have still commented on the proofing errors, but I wouldn't have been so snarky about it, and I wish I hadn't been.

You're also right in your second paragraph, though -- the article didn't read to me like "this is someone who isn't fluent in English," it read like "this is someone who's fluent in English but tossed this article off quickly, made careless mistakes, and didn't bother to make a proofreading pass."

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#560

Post by tikiman163 » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

I think the problem with this article is pretty simple. Confirmation bias plus an unhealthy dose of Juvenoia. He admits in his update that the jobs he takes are cleaning up after projects that have already been recognized for their failures. He also reduces younger developers to a very basic strawman.

He also doesn't appear to have recent experience being a developer that was involved with the first iteration of a project. Yes, things do get over complicated and need to be simplified later. There's always going to be someone getting over excited about using a new tool and insists on using it despite it being expensive and not meeting any additional requirements. The problem is his opinion is entirely based on hindsight and the fact he only gets work after that excited guy has either changed their mind or left.

He also doesn't clearly see the potential benefits of some of these frameworks and architecture. He definitely doesn't get the very basic idea that proper architecture requires choosing solutions based on the business needs. A small simple we pages don't particularly benefit from from complex architecture. Purely offline desktop applications certainly don't benefit from using react native, especially if it's doing anything complicated.

However, standardization of solution approaches across applications does have the benefit of making it much simpler to maintain any employee pool capable of continuing to develop and maintain their software. That's why when an internal tool is needed to manage semi complex data it's generally best to continue using Angular for the web ui and not suddenly decide to use Razor.