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

Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

shift.infinite.red

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 158 posts

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#71

Post by JimDabell »

onion2k wrote: post #62
JimDabell wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The availability of developers who know a language or tech isn't a limiting factor if you're willing to hire people and give them the time to learn. It is a job satisfaction risk though. Just because a person is capable of learning a language or technology, it doesn’t mean that once they have learnt it they will find satisfaction in using it every day. Surely most people with a decent amount of experience has at le…

it also means that you are selecting only the people who know they want to work with it every day whilst filtering out people who would end up disliking it Doesn't that imply that we all like the languages we use every day? I'm fairly sure that's not the case for a lot of developers. In fact, I'm certain loads would like the opportunity to use what they think is a 'better' language, but they can't because too few com…

If somebody is working with a language and applies for another job working with that language, then you have high confidence that they aren’t going to suddenly realise they dislike the language and therefore the job.

If somebody hasn't worked with the language before, that confidence is not there at all.

> I'm certain loads would like the opportunity to use what they think is a 'better' language

Sure, but expectations and reality are not always in agreement. The grass is always greener on the other side, right? Those people might have a different opinion after working with the “better” language for a while.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#72

Post by asiachick »

I wish Flutter would die in a fire! The web version renders everything in a canvas. This sucks! It means, no reading of text because no DOM to read for a11y, no standard context menus (so no OS/browser level spell checking, word lookup, copy and paste, password generation), poor slow 2nd class support for non-roman languages (it has to do it's own font rendering so it asynchronously downloads/rasterizes non-ASCII code points which means new characters show up as placeholders and only appear 500-1000ms later. I'm sure I could go on and on about how bad that decision is.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#73

Post by kodah »

onion2k wrote: post #62
JimDabell wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The availability of developers who know a language or tech isn't a limiting factor if you're willing to hire people and give them the time to learn. It is a job satisfaction risk though. Just because a person is capable of learning a language or technology, it doesn’t mean that once they have learnt it they will find satisfaction in using it every day. Surely most people with a decent amount of experience has at le…

it also means that you are selecting only the people who know they want to work with it every day whilst filtering out people who would end up disliking it Doesn't that imply that we all like the languages we use every day? I'm fairly sure that's not the case for a lot of developers. In fact, I'm certain loads would like the opportunity to use what they think is a 'better' language, but they can't because too few com…

> Doesn't that imply that we all like the languages we use every day?

Yes and no. I tolerate writing in Java, but for most applications I'm not a fan. I think what GP is alluding to is that developer ergonomics matter more than we give them mindshare for.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#74

Post by [deleted] »

a4isms wrote: post #64
evan_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just fall through a time portal from 2008? JavaScript hasn't been the exclusive domain of "script kiddies" for a loooong time.

What's very interesting about your comment is this: Let's say that JavaScrip was a language for "kiddies" in 2008. Let's call them people in the age group 17-22. That was fourteen years ago, and those "kiddies" are now 31-36. In 2008, they were in entry-level positions. Today, they have over a decade of industry experience and are lead engineers, engineering managers, &c. It's not like they "grew up and switched to a…

[deleted]

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#75

Post by [deleted] »

mjburgess wrote: post #26
mwattsun wrote: post #7

I've programmed a lot in both Dart and C# and my take is that Microsoft looked at Java and decided they needed a Java-like language like so they made C#. Google was into Java but Oracle sued them over it so they decided they needed a Java-like language so made Dart. Edit: Dart is ridiculously easy to learn because it's very familiar so if someone complains about having to learn Dart it means they don't want to learn…

If that's the strategy behind dart, it would be the de-facto android language and they'd have a JVM target. It's hard to place dart in a modern languages context, it really only made sense as a "next javascript" bet in 2011 -- pre-ES6. It feels legacy now, maybe flutter will be a rivial -- seems unlikely though.

[deleted]

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#76

Post by sandGorgon »

so this article is fairly nice - and I'm glad you touch on the "hiring" part.

Funnily, the opposite is true in India - which is basically the world's largest android (and android dev) market.

React Native devs are hard to come by. React is very very very popular. But not react native. Especially in colleges. I have done the A/B tests here.

Flutter is really viral. Just FYI - ultimately the talent is going to come flying off the boat from somewhere right !

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#77

Post by ozim »

onion2k wrote: post #24

This article highlights one of the things that really bugs me about tech hiring. The availability of developers who know a language or tech isn't a limiting factor if you're willing to hire people and give them the time to learn. Yes, it's expensive, but if there really are productivity benefits from using a particular tool then you should end up better off in the long term anyway. The expectation that another compan…

I would like to take different point of view.

Developers also switch jobs to get more salary and market themselves as specialists in a specific stack.

I yet have to see developer taking pay cut to retrain in a different tech.

Companies already have to factor in training of people on their company specific stuff. That is why no one expects new hire to be fully productive in first 3-6 months. Even if you know JavaScript it still is quite a lot of work to understand code base ... now take someone who does not know JavaScript and as addition has to learn company specific stuff.

That is why hiring is like that because "tech" is transferrable skill between companies and developers like to invest into transferrable skills.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#78

Post by spaetzleesser »

mrtksn wrote: post #60
wiradikusuma wrote: post #5

I think Flutter is better _because_ it uses Dart. I used to hate that decision ("Not another language to learn.."), but Flutter and Dart are like Mac and macOS (I'm aware people complaining about macOS quality going down the hill.. but that's another story). They're both from the same company, seemingly built for each other, and the language (Dart) improvements are _relevant_ for the platform (Flutter). Flutter still…

>Flutter still has its quirks, but hands down, it's the best platform for the majority of "standard" apps How is the market for "standard" apps doing? One would think that by now "UI for a Database/API" should have died out already? Even if companies do need an UI for a DB or an API, that job must have had become really simple with all the frameworks and libraries. On Twitter I keep seeing people building the million…

"How is the market for "standard" apps doing? One would think that by now "UI for a Database/API" should have died out already? Even if companies do need an UI for a DB or an API, that job must have had become really simple with all the frameworks and libraries."

From my casual observation the learning curve for "UI for a Database/API" is becoming steeper every year. Such software reached its high point with VB6 or MS Access but since then simple tools have been dying and replaced with ever more complex frameworks. You still can't easily develop a web app that's as powerful and simple as you could do on the desktop with VB6 or MS Access.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#79

Post by angst_ridden »

samwillis wrote: post #37

I want to throw Ionic and Capacitor (or any other webview based toolkit with your favourite SPA framework) into this mix, I believe for a lot of apps its probably a better option than either Flutter or React Native. I also don't and believe in "one true cross platform toolkit", each has its place. So: Hiring - The OP suggests React Native has a larger pool of developers than Flutter, very true. But Ionic/Capacitor/et…

I've developed some apps in Ionic/Cordova and Ionic/Capacitor. I agree that it's a decent system, especially for people (like me) who are just in a rush to implement something and aren't so caught up in platform wars.

I'm one of those people who couldn't care less about the language I use to code in - I just want to get stuff done. From my perspective, Javascript has some stupid stuff, but so does every other language.

My only significant objection to Ionic/Capacitor is the whole nodejs ecosystem. I hate getting dropped into dependency hell all the time. And it's significantly worse if you're stuck (as I a) supporting an end-of-lifed Cordova plugin for necessary functionality.

Now, in the real world, I'd have a team and we'd just build our own version of the plugin and get rid of the web of dependencies, but sadly I'm just one not-very-bright guy off on his own.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#80

Post by FpUser »

vbezhenar wrote: post #35
onion2k wrote: post #24

This article highlights one of the things that really bugs me about tech hiring. The availability of developers who know a language or tech isn't a limiting factor if you're willing to hire people and give them the time to learn. Yes, it's expensive, but if there really are productivity benefits from using a particular tool then you should end up better off in the long term anyway. The expectation that another compan…

You will spend year teaching someone then he leaves for another company who gave him 20% rase. You're net negative, they're net positive. You'll lose the race in the end. This could be a good approach for someone huge like Google or government. Asking that from an ordinary company will not work.

>"You will spend year teaching someone then he leaves for another company who gave him 20% rase."

If you hire decent developer and it takes a year to teach them for example react to be productive the problem is not with the developer. Normal developer should be reasonable productive in a matter of days. Ok give it a month. And it does not require tutor hanging over the shoulder.

The problem is with you as you've just hired someone who's at the moment unqualified as a developer in general.

Post reply on HN