Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things that used to be hard and are now easy

jvns.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 316 posts

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#61

Post by stargrazer »

grishka wrote: post #24
adwn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then create an open source cross-platform GUI framework/toolkit that's technologically superior to Electron and also at least as easy and convenient to use and deploy, and people will dump Electron in droves. I mean, please do ! I would be delighted about an efficient, cross-platform, cross-language, convenient GUI toolkit. But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm tired of people complaining about Electron without offe…

Cross-platform GUIs shouldn't exist. That's it. They always inevitably are worse then native ones.

It is as thought browser/javascript is the only thing out there now. Or at least appears to be implied in the comments.

Just wanted to state that in other worlds, like C++, there exist tools like wxWidgets which provide cross platform GUI.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#62

Post by eatonphil »

TheCondor wrote: post #58
eatonphil wrote: post #25

Personally, I disagree that parsing was hard before and made easy with PEG parsing. For decades it has been easy and common to implement parsers by hand. From what I can tell, universities and textbooks just overcomplicated the process by teaching parser generators. I have done a few studies of various open source ecosystems now and (edited: other than CPython) I haven't seen PEG parsers really used in anything but t…

It’s been a minute but parsing with decent performance is what caused all the parser generator stuff. It is a historically hard problem. PEGs allow the generator input to more closely match the mental model programmers have, *LR require the language to be structured just a little differently than how most people think it.

Well if most production parsers use hand-written parsers (and aside from SQL databases, they mostly do) I don't think performance would really make sense to be the reason anyone chooses parser generators.

I'd be curious to read any posts/papers you've got that have benchmarks that show performance to be a reason.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#63

Post by shrimp_emoji »

grishka wrote: post #14
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's the only reason Discord, Slack, VS Code, and other apps exist on operating systems other than Windows/MacOS.

Tbh the world would've been better off if these apps didn't exist. Especially VS Code.

>Especially VS Code.

Why? :c The next best thing is Atom. And, tragically, Atom is way worse. (Believe me, I wanted it to win the hackable-lite-IDE war, but... it didn't.) I don't like Microsoft, but VS Code won. Although, technically, I use "Code - OSS", which is the no-proprietary-code version.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#64

Post by cm2187 »

wackget wrote: post #31

Eh... I'd argue against quite a lot of those being "easier" than doing things manually. Docker is a prime example. It's supposedly easier to spin up a docker container for a basic web server stack, but to be honest I'd rather install PHP/MySQL and an SSL certificate manually, rather than spend time finding a decent container from a trustworthy source, and then spend 20 minutes trying to figure out how and why it's be…

In .net, mandatory async/await for new API is also making things that were easy harder. Async introduces multithreading where there wasn’t, breaks call stacks (debugging harder), deadlocks in certain conditions but not others (asp or winform vs console), forces you to handle what happens if the user interacts with the UI before your function is done executing, etc.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#65

Post by titzer »

theden wrote: post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

> Not having to worry about dongles, i.e. connecting USB devices to your machine

The dongles. OMG. It's worse than the parallel printer age. I cannot recall another period in history where I needed a dongle so often. USB-C only on Macbooks was such a huge design mistake. Especially in the era of USB-A! Soooooo many things are still USB-A. All for a little more thinness! It's really grating.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#66

Post by anthk »

adamnemecek wrote: post #5
adrift wrote: post #3

"Building fast programs, with Go/Rust" Sure, bud.

They are both so much more pleasant to work with than C.

Golang was created from the same people of C, it's what C++ should have been. It takes lots of background from plan9, the 'Unix++' OS.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#67

Post by codeflo »

theden wrote: post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

I agree with all of those. More things that are harder now:

* Finding honest product impressions/reviews.

* When looking for a configuration setting or tip to use any piece of software, find a one minute article with clear bullet points instead of an 11 minute YouTube video with a personal backstory and a VPN sponsorship.

* Finding a cooking recipe that isn’t padded with SEO nonsense.

* When finding an online discussion or blog article in a search result, being able to read it straight in the (mobile) browser without hostile prompts to make an account and/or download an app.

* (Europeans only.) Publish a simple website without worrying that the hosting provider you choose doesn’t perfectly conform to privacy laws that even lawyers won’t explain to you and you’re personally liable for ridiculous damages.

* Run software developed by hobby programmers on machines you own.

* Connect devices like speakers, keyboards and mice to computers. (Edit: You mention that.)

And, completely disagreeing with the article on this one point, this is also harder:

* Writing cross-platform UIs. As someone with a lot of hate for Java from back in the day, this is painful to write, but: Java Swing might not have produced the nicest GUIs, but the stack was so much simpler than Electron+Node+Express+Webpack+React+TypeScript (substitute Svelte, Vite or whatever you want), it’s not even funny.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#68

Post by toomanydoubts »

theden wrote: post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

* Making sure you're not being spied on

Not sure if this was ever easier, but to me it seems it got harder. With all the possible attack vectors, ranging from chain of supply attacks hard-coded deep down on the cpus, up to malicious dependencies being replaced everyday on npm, how does anyone trust their machine?

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#69

Post by anthk »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #30
sharikous wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the sort of modern systems available to wealthy developers try to run more than two Electron apps at a time and tell me if you don't feel the slugginess

> try to run more than two Electron apps at a time and tell me if you don't feel the slugginess I run more than two Electron apps at a time and everything is fine. Unless you’re running ancient hardware with 4GB of RAM and trying to load up many intensive applications (Electron or otherwise) it’s not a problem. If anything gets “sluggish” then you’re probably swapping, but it’s difficult to actually reach that point…

No post body was provided.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#70

Post by antirez »

It's very hard to accept the statement that writing fast programs is now simpler with Go/Rust. I think that what happened is more like this:

* With Go is now possible to write reasonably fast (not as fast as C) programs in a simpler way. That's great indeed, but is not exactly the above statement.

* With Rust it is possible to write programs that have a speed that is comparable to the one of C programs, that are memory safe. So Rust made memory safety simpler, but writing a fast program in C is often simpler compared to writing a fast program in Rust, if we ignore memory safety. Overall Rust made programming harder: something that I'll hardly excuse to it.

EDIT: The blog post was modified, so it only lists "Go" in the section about fast programs. My comment refers to the version of the blog post I read.

Post reply on HN