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

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#591

Post by ihateolives » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 7:51 AM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #551

ihateolives wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). O…

Autocomplete was one example, but I wouldn't underestimate the importance of tooling when you want to onboard people new to the language. Does fp even have package/dependency manager? How good are linters?

I wrote my first pieces of shitty Turbo C code before autocomplete was a thing, in a DOS editor. There was no discovery of language syntax or features, you had to have a paper manual open on your desk. So I got frustrated, didn't stick around (dumb decision in retrospective), turned to webdev, at least the turnaround from code to result was quicker. For some time I thought it couldn't get any better than syntax highlighting, but it did. And now I just don't want to work with languages that don't have good lsp support. Been there, done that, nope, not going back.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#592

Post by razemio » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 8:20 AM UTC

godDLL wrote: post #588

razemio wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that you mention this. I run it perfectly on my raspi 3 using code-server on home assistent. Now please tell me, what is a better IDE then vscode for a raspi 3? It barely uses any ram on the server side. Wouldn't it have been written in electron the code-server project would not be possible. Using a raspi not as a headless device when programming is a stretch. So the only IDEs that come to my mind are vim, emac…

> Wouldn't it have been written in electron the code-server project would not be possible. Please clarify what is so special about Electron in that case. It was so slow they had to do it that way, is that what you're saying?

I am saying that it would not be possible to put it in the browser if it would not be web based. It is a perfect fit for headless devices. It also runs fine when you put a desktop on the pi but this is certainly not a use case I would prefer. It also runs superb on chrome books. You can literally put it anywhere. Please let's just be done with this discussion, if you can awnser my initial question. What ui library would you prefer over electron which is as cross platform compatible? I would gladly switch if there is a lightweight alternative.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#593

Post by jart » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 8:25 AM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #147

323 wrote: post #89

This article reminds me of when assembly programmers were ranting how stupid it is to use the bloated C language to create apps when assembly is perfectly fine for that, and how it's all driven by lazy programmers who don't want to learn how to write efficient code.

Or hardware engineers ranting about how software is bloated when you can achieve the same thing by arranging some transistors. For example, Steve Wozniak created a working breakout game using 44 transistors. This was 1974, back then each transistor costed enough money that companies paid a lot for low transistor solutions. Today every computer has many billions of transistors.

Wozniak says it was 45 chips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17eUExffa5w I would be surprised if only had 45 transistors. https://www.progettosnaps.net/manuals/pdf/breakout.pdf

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#594

Post by jart » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 8:36 AM UTC

SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #291

Always seems odd that the cranky dinosaur doesn't use his/her unix super powers to gather likeminded talent to build the world's greatest, simplest, cheapest app and retire a billionaire. It's almost like there is more to the decision making process than that. /s

Dinosaur here. I used my UNIX superpowers to do just that. https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#595

Post by drw85 » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 10:46 AM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #480

maerF0x0 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

security folks sometimes dont realize the connection between Hash functions (for data structures) and Cryptographic Hashing (aka digest) functions. Perhaps that was the confusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function

No I have definitely seen people with fancy titles around data security and now also GDPR 'specialists/consultants', who lack the most basic CS knowledge, sometimes coming from other fields like business and administration. People will chase opportunities wherever they find them, if you have a good network and managers who are as clueless as you then you can absolutely fake it till you sort of make it (in large enoug…

To this day i haven't met a security consultant or data protection person that had any idea what they were talking about. I'm not talking about experts, but people that were appointed and got the title "Security something".

Most of them were regular business people that just parrot some buzzwords like "Encryption" and "at least 256 bit".

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#596

Post by clusterfish » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 11:43 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #261

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…

You are saving your own time and resources, in exchange for those of every one of your users . That insanely selfish attitude is why we are so incensed by this crap --- especially when it's developers making the lives of other developers worse. Have some respect for your users; they might be developers too.

Almost none of those users are willing to pay 4x the price for native iOS, Android, Windows, Macos, and Linux apps (on top of the web version).

Also, I do not, in fact, have 4x the time to implement all that, vacation or not, nor do I have enough revenue to justify hiring a team of specialized developers.

It's about as selfish of me to be building on Electron as it is of you to not be working full time on Tauri or some other secure and high performance solution to this problem. Which is - not at all. Nobody is entitled to our dev time for free or against our will.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#597

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #534

marcus_holmes wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> the average web browser and connection is fast enough to serve Wordpress content in an acceptable time for the user ...That's because (unless something has changed in Wordpress relatively recently) what the browser receives is, in fact, "flat HTML". Wordpress is written in PHP, and all the processing happens server-side.

All true. But I was referring to the server side.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#598

Post by koffiezet » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

clusterfish wrote: post #161

ryandrake wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this isn't the first time in history that quality and performance got thrown under the bus for the sake of cost. When developer salaries are your highest cost, and you have to make more and more money, eventually everything will get (and has gotten) sacrificed at the altar of "developer cost". Historically, commercial software development has never been the place for perfectionist "software craftsmanship". If…

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…

Fully agree. I have a background in C/C++ and a bunch of other languages, I'm probably in a better position to write native apps, and am no Electron fan, but I never got into native GUI's for a reason. Certainly if they have to be portable, it's an absolute mess. I already did throw together basic VueJS web apps for management interfaces for another projects, and now I need a similar interface, but with some OS-level access. My choice right now is not between a native app or an electron (or something similar) app, it's between having an actual viable project/product or having nothing at all.

I can't afford to waste time and money on native apps for multiple platforms. And I know that once my thing would bring in money, I could easily find someone not too expensive to take over the work on that UI.

Native apps cost a LOT more money, not to mention organisational overhead to bring feature parity to all. Bringing something native to 4 platforms is nowhere near an x4 cost, optimistically it would be more like x8.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#599

Post by com2kid » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 3:52 PM UTC

Hasu wrote: post #391

com2kid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple CRUD app so your employees can work with some structured data in a DB somewhere, let's say so sales can check inventory levels in an existing database. A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks.…

> OK so I wouldn't call React "stable", hopefully it has undergone its last major redesign for awhile (LOL), but there is tons of tooling for it. I'm not sure what you're talking about. The last major feature addition to React was Hooks in 2018. But that didn't break stability at all - you can still use all of the old React APIs and ignore that Hooks exist entirely. The React team has actually been incredibly thought…

> The last major feature addition to React was Hooks in 2018. But that didn't break stability at all - you can still use all of the old React APIs and ignore that Hooks exist entirely.

Yes, except that hooks completely changed how React is written, and most libraries and code samples now days use hooks. You basically had to learn a brand new way of writing React. I learned react pre-2018 (tens of thousands of LOC written) and I basically "don't know React" now.

Then there is the ecosystem churn. I got tired of my routers breaking, all the bloody time. In 2 years I had to rewrite the routing for my code twice, each time took multiple days of frustration[1].

There has been the rise and fall of Redux, which again, massive churn in the ecosystem.

[1] In defense of React I was using React Native Web which, at least at the time, was a pile of many small disasters combined into a single code base. Also it wasn't as well documented as I'd like, and eventually I had to scrap it and move to regular React, which solved many of my issues.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#600

Post by efreak » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #334

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…

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…

It's not that I don't appreciate it. It's that I _don't care_. I've only got 16gb of ram, and much of that is used by things I actually care about, like airsonic, a Linux VM, fb2k, etc (yes, my PC is my home sever). Even if I were to dump all this, there's a limited number of electron apps I'm willing to use, and none of them are things I leave open all the time. Authy particularly annoys me, since I have no choice if I wish to use their authenticator (humble bundle doesn't support totp, only Authy 2fa)