Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by mrtksn » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #81

mrtksn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The basic UI is the easy part. Established companies have established company problems, complex flows that need to account for things like legacy deep links, A/B testing, UIs that go off the beaten path for brand identity, etc. It all adds up to very little of a common denominator for all of these apps. I've worked on some of the top apps in the play store for their respective categories, and if you saw their codebas…

Oh sure, all good points. However in such cases React vs Flutter is not the part of the discussion at all because they tend to have so much investment that re-do is almost not an option. Bespoke tools, integrations, accommodations for odd behaviours or bugs etc. are huge costs. So many horror stories of failed re-do's.

I was thinking about greenfield projects.

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

#92

Post by ecshafer » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

I have a couple issues with this article.

The first is the claim that Flutter is one of the most popular native apps. I haven't seen or heard of anyone actually using it. Flutter and Dart barely exist. After React native, the next biggest would probably be just plane old native, or electron.

The second is their claim that google has a great developer experience. I legitimately have never had any google product with a good developer experience. They always have a painful developer experience compared to Facebook products.

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

#93

Post by tlamponi » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #30

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…

As someone who started programming using GCC, Vi and commandline tools, I just hate the tooling around Flutter. And yes, someone will probably point out that I can use Flutter with commandline tools after I disable all the bloatware that needs to be installed anyway, but that's missing the point.

You only need dart and flutter itself, and both of those can used via CLI just fine, I know because when I develop flutter I exclusively use my classic tmux+vim setup to do so.

If I want to create an android build I naturally also need the android SDK, but that is even packaged for Debian or Arch Linux, and even if I use the newest one directly from Google its just a one time setup, and that is completely unrelated to flutter (which I can test via the native or web build too) but 100% related with the build target (android in this case), so really not seeing your point.

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

#94

Post by titusjohnson » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

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…

In my experience there's always _something_ that isn't well supported by design tools. Some validation rule, some odd required relationship, a UI that isn't at all supported, and what is supported isn't at all liked by stakeholders. Half the app is legacy and still being migrated and this new widget depends on XX legacy component, etc.. I've personally observed 3 apps start as a GUI-based application, but by the time it shipped v1, and definitely v2, most of the app was hand-rolled.

Also in my experience, basically every company out there needs or wants an app. A web app, a phone app, a TV app, a tablet app.. internal apps, external apps, apps to gap 3rd party app integrations, they're fucking everywhere. A lot of these 'apps' are just web forms over CRUD data for one reason for another, but it's custom for some reason. And the reasons for why a GUI builder gets phased out also applies to why app-farm apps also get phased out of a company. Eventually, with enough success, having an internal dev team is just so much smoother than contracting or bridging the gap with excel spreadsheets. Someone has to wire things together, and eventually they get to fixing the root cause of inconsistency and a custom app is born.

I think we will have programming jobs for basic forms for a lot longer than any one of us would suspect, for a lot of reasons. But my last and most important thought is, once something becomes easy for anyone to do it becomes common. To stand out you need to be uncommon in some way, so there will always be space for people who can do what most others cannot.

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

#95

Post by orra » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #50

vbezhenar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. This only makes sense if you hired the person at 20% below their market rate under the belief that they were less valuable as a hire simply because they didn't have a specific skillset you needed, and then once they acquired that skillset you failed to adjust their salary accordingly. But the entire thesis of the OPs comm…

> But the entire thesis of the OPs comment is that we shouldn't be valuing staff based on any one specific technical skillset, but rather based on their broader software development skills and experience, because learning the ins and outs of any specific software stack is not itself that difficult given enough experience.

Exactly. Tech stacks are extremely transferrable, at least to an experienced developer.

Imagine hiring a painter. You want a green wall. You don't rule them out, or pay them 20% less, because the last wall they painted was pink.

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

#96

Post by mjmahone17 » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

ozim wrote: post #77

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 JavaScrip…

Learning JavaScript is such a small cost for an experienced developer who has done any kind of similar work in any language, relative to the 3-6 months of company level ramp up you propose, as to be essentially meaningless.

If you need a JS expert because you currently don’t have anyone who can figure out performance problems with junior engineer’s changes, that’s one thing, but you then probably can train that JS expert in any JS framework very quickly. Likewise if you need a UX expert, that UX expert should be able to pick up Swift or whatever language you need them to work in faster than it takes them to grok the business problems you’re actually solving.

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

#97

Post by cameronh90 » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

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…

> massively inhibits the proliferation of different, new, and interesting technologies

Do people really look at the JS webapp framework landscape and feel that LACK of proliferation is a problem?

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

#98

Post by dustymcp » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #57

klodolph wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart is also surprisingly nice, in a lot of ways. I don't want to get down too much into the details because much of language design is subjective. I found it very easy to work with because it has a lot of the edges sanded off, relative to JavaScript. The developer experience is pretty good.

One of the things that always surprises me about Dart is that Google continued to invest in it for so long without any real returns until fairly recently. Dart came out in 2012 and to my knowledge had basically no usage for several years. Flutter came out in 2017, and then it took a decent amount of time to start picking up steam. Very uncharacteristic of Google to invest in something like Dart for 7+ years before it…

I think it was used internally with Google and probably why they kept it going?

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

#99

Post by bseidensticker » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #80

vbezhenar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IDK what your experience is, but in my experience at Google it would take about 6 months before I could consider someone "reasonably productive". Or maybe it takes about 6 months before I'm confident that they are actually underperforming.

A week is just enough time to get a cursory understanding of the product and tooling and fix a newbie bug.

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

#100

Post by sarchertech » Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #80

vbezhenar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In most cases that I’ve seen, it’s not React that’s difficult to ramp up on, it’s the overly complicated codebase.

Now you could make an argument that React/Rails/whatever shares some of the blame for encouraging/allowing the state of the code.