Earlier quoted context omitted.
QT is much faster than Electron.
Thanks for the information, however that isn't really relevant to the points I'm making.
> that isn't really relevant to the points I'm making.
But maybe it should be.
Is the madness ever going to end?
611–620 of 629 posts
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fru…
> Does fp even have package/dependency manager?
Sigh... "Does [Product X] even have [solution for Product Y problem]?"
A "package/dependency manager" is only necessary in languages based on using umpteen million unvetted modules downloaded from the net. Not all languages work like JavaScript in that respect.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#613The 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…
Such web solutions are cheaper because the software market is really sick. There is almost no point in competing on quality and performance for consumer software, because some start-up with hundreds of millions of VC funding or some SW megacorp will enter the market and give their mediocre product away for free while paying engineers N times more than what you can offer. Bonus points if the software is at least partl…
Horribly cynical... And oh so true. (Because sometimes, reality is horribly cynical.)
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#614The 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…
The thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. It's vastly, vastly easier to develop a really good, clean app, with a great UI in it — especially a UI that needs lots of unique, new components that aren't in an OS-level GUI api's standard set. You compare really well-built electron apps (VSCode, Discord) with their competition, and it's suc…
> The thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. [...] even Apple, previously the trophy-holder for "best gui-builder tools
You've never used Delphi, FP/Lazarus, or even Visual Basic, have you?
___
[Edited to add (equally erroneous) Apple quote.]
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#615The 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…
> 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.…
> So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website.
Or you can adopt a free software / open source simple app building solution for all four OSes (or, hm, at least three of them -- not quite sure about iOS) that compiles natively on these and many other OSes. Sure, the UI would preferably be designed differently for desktop vs small-screen mobile, but you have that problem with Electron too, don't you?
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#616No it probably won't end. No you are not a dinosaur, but development has changed. Decades ago you could build an app from the ground up. This gave you a bunch of different layers to compose, and probably made the app overall simpler. Now most developers are given a box to create their feature in whether it's a Spring Bean, a React Component, or a serverless function, with an entire application stack under it. You cou…
That's a great perspective, but are those peeps writing the unused frameworks just wasting their time to solve a question nobody has asked? Take the D language, it's basically a poor man's Java, with a shoddy garbage collector and aspirations at being C/C++... Is that the work of heroes or the misguided?
D has interesting features like invariants
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#617Earlier 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…
What about running those apps on Android and iPhones?
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#618I feel comfortable with asserting that the author has never worked on a complex web application. This web-dev hate borders on pathological: this is a guy that seems to specialize in Unix/Linux tooling, doesn't have a single tutorial on web app development [1], and yet has an intense hatred towards a space that he barely understands. These types of arguments are incredibly embarrassing to read, not only because they b…
I'm a webdev, I've done nothing but full-stack web development for the past 10 years, and I mostly agree with this guy. I hate Electron garbage, the slowness is infuriating. I hate SPAs and React, it's unnecessary abstraction overhead in 90% of the projects I've seen it used in. The only thing I don't agree with him about is PHP, because the benefits provided by abstracting routing and templating into a "proper" fram…
There's a nuanced argument to be made that companies reach for complex tooling too quickly, but that's not what the author said. He's convinced that none of this tooling should exist in the first place, there is no application for them, and everyone is stupid for not just using the basics.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#619I feel comfortable with asserting that the author has never worked on a complex web application. This web-dev hate borders on pathological: this is a guy that seems to specialize in Unix/Linux tooling, doesn't have a single tutorial on web app development [1], and yet has an intense hatred towards a space that he barely understands. These types of arguments are incredibly embarrassing to read, not only because they b…
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…
> Why do we need npm or babel at all to make a simple web frontend?
See, that's a reasonable argument: many companies tend to reach for complex web tooling when simpler tools would do for the task at hand. But that's not what the author is arguing. He's convinced that none of this tooling should have ever been produced in the first place, it exists solely to stroke the egos of their creators, and anyone who uses it is stupid. That's just absurd. I've worked on complex client-based applications that would have been an order of magnitude more difficult to develop, maintain, and refactor without React.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#620> So, now your simple news article or blog post takes ages to load on a 1 gigabit connection and requires about 3 times as much electrical power even though you're only serving text and perhaps a few images If all the website is doing is serving news articles or blog posts, then sure. But, web is increasingly used to build apps. Apps are different from documents. No, it isn't crazy to build apps that run in the brows…
Web is a terrible app platform. Unfortunately it's the best one available.
I hear there's a lot of things "called operating systems" out there; nearly every computer seems to be running one. Couldn't one somehow run applications on those?