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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?

#571

Post by Karrot_Kream »

bogdanoff_2 wrote: post #295
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…

What is it about building "web-related technology" that makes it so cheap? Is it actually that much cheaper? And if so, why? Why isn't there a platform for making apps that compares?

A huge pipeline of labor who understands it and mature tooling that creates a much lower skill floor for labor to be productive. Bootcamps, tutorials, freelancers, contractors, there's a _lot_ of resources in all sorts of languages about web development. Many fewer resources on trading packets over TCP, or making a desktop GUI, and even fewer on cross-platform GUIs.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#572

Post by jabbany »

vbezhenar wrote: post #472
jabbany wrote: post #263

What I don't get about the rant is why it matters what the "modern" way is. It's not like any of the old tools have disappeared right? If you don't like Electron/NW, nobody's stopping you from building native apps with Qt, GTK, or you can just draw your own UI raw! If you don't like frameworks with their own templating systems, maybe don't use them? I don't like them either! and yet rather than complain I just don't…

Responsibility stops me from building applications and services using obscure tools or writing my own tools. Because it'll be rewritten by later developers using commonly-used tools. There's certain expectations. You don't write your own logger library in Java, you're using logback or log4j (despite them being monstrosities). You don't write your own framework or use some obscure framework like Helidon. You use Sprin…

> Because it'll be rewritten by later developers using commonly-used tools.

Everything will eventually be rewritten so this isn't much of an argument... What's "common" today won't be that way forever, likely not even for a couple of years (which is the whole point).

There's no reason to use a particular tool because it's common. A proper developer uses the tool that is right. If that happens to be old, so be it. An engineer should be able to decide what to use based on merits of tools not just picking up the new shiny.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#573

Post by int_19h »

crubier wrote: post #346
int_19h wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer, that is correct. As the end user of those "native" web-repackaged apps, the experience is just subpar. Give me back my native widgets and consistent UX.

You can have them back! Just use old versions of your apps, or old apps. But you won’t because deep down you know that those “web repackaged” apps are actually better than old GTK apps. More features, nicer UI, etc.

Not really. The problem with old versions of apps is that they don't support anything newer (standards, protocols, file formats etc). And then there's security vulnerabilities.

But that aside, when picking between different pieces of software, one of which is Electron, and the other one is Qt, I'll always pick Qt unless the Electron one is drastically better feature-wise (haven't seen that in practice yet).

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#574

Post by marcosdumay »

Jetrel wrote: post #569
marcosdumay wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hum... We are down in a thread where people are complaining it takes several seconds to see a set of text messages.

Yeah, it's worth pointing out that people are blaming electron for what's wrong with Slack. When, perhaps, it's just Slack itself that sucks? I use Discord all the time, which is one hell of an oranges-to-oranges comparison (with Slack), and not only does it have none of the perf problems of Slack, it's also faster and snappier than any NATIVE chat app I've used . There's a lot that can be done wrong in any framework…

If nearly every single professionally written and quality vetted code created on JS is so slow that it takes several seconds to do things that software used to do instantly 60 years ago, is this really not a problem with the language?

Yes, JS can be much faster than every single piece of it you will find people using. It's just that every developer that has some main focus different from execution performance is holding it wrong.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#575

Post by jonny_eh »

mhitza wrote: post #547
stnmtn wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alre…

> Running an IRC server is definitely not complicated

Humour on HN is generally frowned upon.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#576

Post by housecarpenter »

baryphonic wrote: post #306

I don't disagree with the theme, but it would be much more persuasive coming from a Lisp corner of the world. Just today, I was discussing with a friend about the lack of tail calls in mainstream languages (outside of FP), and how the typical reason cited ("you lose debug stack traces!") makes no sense under any scrutiny (the stack losses from looping are necessarily total, yet tail calls can easily be implemented fl…

This may be somewhat off-topic, but I think the point of "you lose debug stack traces!" is that with tail call elimination, you have more possibility for confusion from people who inadvertently write a tail call, or who write something tail-recursive without caring about the stack growth (e.g. if it only recurses a few times in their use cases). That's where the increased difficulty comes from; of course loops/state machines/tail-recursive functions are hard to debug either way. I guess basically the problem is that with loops you know what you're in for with regards to debugging, whereas tail-recursion is kind of implicit---you have to learn how to recognize a tail call, which is non-trivial, or at least non-trivial compared to distinguishing a loop from a function call.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#577

Post by emodendroket »

tremon wrote: post #565
emodendroket wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they are, because the user does not reward them for being sparing of resources that are, frankly, insignificant on modern devices. Might be different in you were operating in a market where people were largely relying on very low-powered devices, though.

That's a circular argument, because "on modern devices" moves the goalposts every year. I still have a Galaxy Note II, which I would definitively classify as a modern device. But some webpages have terrible performance on it, because anything older than 3 years is not worth optimizing for. Same thing with old iPhones: the only reason they don't work reliably today is because each piece of "modern software" is less ef…

Perhaps a circular process. Not a circular argument. It's just reality that users reward optimization they can't really notice less than features. In places where it does matter to the bottom line, like how fast a shopping page loads, the optimization is prioritized.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#578

Post by omgitsabird »

lucideer wrote: post #549
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.

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 ea…

"Large PHP applications" doesn't immediately express to me that you combine styles, scripts, and markup in your templates and have a need for automated context-aware escaping.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#579

Post by [deleted] »

zrm wrote: post #358
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…

We can kind of see how this happened. There are multiple platforms and nobody wants to write a separate app for each one. So now you need a framework to make apps multi-platform. Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this. They have the most market share. Before Electron existed, people would just write native apps for Windows and nothing else, locking people into Microsoft. Apple has resources, they have th…

[deleted]

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#580

Post by zaptheimpaler »

dilyevsky wrote: post #553
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I feel like my attitude has a chance of creating change, whereas the attitude of going along with whatever as long as you get paid is guaranteed to change nothing. And yeah I have worked at and gotten offers from FAANG and adjacent startups with hard interviews - competence has nothing to do with it.
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