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I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
41–50 of 308 posts
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#42I don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology. It works for mobile development, for frontend, for backend, for infra, for almost anything. I have worked for years with PHP, Apache, Ansible and MySQL. Nowadays not anymore. And in 7 years I’ll be using something…
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Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#43I recently started building my first Flutter app and overall I've found it to be surprisingly pleasant. I've had no trouble finding good packages for features I need and even though I'm learning the language and APIs as I go I've made rapid progress.
I've done many apps in Electron, React Native & native iOS and at least on a technological level I prefer the devx of Flutter.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#44Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know right? Just like Golang, Kubernetes, Chrome APIs, etc /s
I’m not sure why sarcasm is needed. Go lost to Rust as the mainstream safe systems language, k8s is a meme for wasted engineering resources, obviously Dart/Dash failed in its intention to replace JavaScript (I don’t know what ‘Chrome APIs’ are).
Go lost to Rust. Citation?
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#46Dart is my biggest issue with Flutter. It's still missing ergonomic features like data classes and lower level things like unsigned 64-bit integers. There is no runtime reflection, which I think is a good thing for end user apps, but it's also missing static metaprogramming. And code generation is not integrated into a complier. Since, there is no runtime reflection, metaprogramming & integrated code-gen are sorely n…
The biggest issue with Dart IMHO is not so much the language itself, but the ecosystem.
For the record, Swift suffers from this problem as well. Kotlin only avoids it because of Java interop, although even this becomes complicated because of Google’s half-assed implementation of Java on Android.
I think this is one of the biggest reasons to reach for JavaScript instead. It has a lot of flaws, but it has a huge ecosystem that works nearly everywhere.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#47I spent quite some cycles into flutter|dart, ended up with React Native for mobile and wxWidgets for cross platform desktop GUI(electron.js is too fat for me and wxWidgets 3.2 looks decent).
RN(javascript) and wxWidgets(c++) are both job friendly, unlike Dart, which is a language I actually enjoy, but there are not a lot jobs for it anywhere.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely, I feel I could be employed tomorrow in a language or stack that I haven’t even heard of and start being productive by the end of the week! I seriously think you owe it to yourself to practice learning something new every week. It often takes one afternoon to get a “taste” and small side project to get beyond that. Every programming language. Is literally just a template for instructions, and every technol…
So could you be a productive iOS/Android developer in a week with no previous experience?
My experience is that learning a new language -at a basic level- can be done quickly (like a couple of weeks, not days).
But learning it at an advanced level, is a whole different matter.
I've been writing Swift since, literally, a few hours after it was announced, in 2014. I write Swift every day (like, seven days a week), and have been, since that first day.
I feel as if I have only had "mastery" of the language for the last couple of years. There's still plenty for me to learn, and they keep adding more stuff.
But the language isn't the big deal. The deal for me, is the fundamental SDK/API/Framework. That has been an ongoing project since 1986. As soon as I learn one API, they change it up (and sometimes, the entire OS).
During that time, I've written in 68K ASM, Pascal, Object Pascal, C, C+- (the weird THINK C variant), C++. ObjC, and Swift. I've worked with MacApp, OpenDoc(!), Think Libraries (Pascal and C), PowerPlant, and Cocoa (and its expression in iOS, WatchOS, AppKit, and TVOS).
I've always considered hiring folks to be an investment. As a manager, I always looked for folks that had the fundamentals down, and assumed that I could train them into what we need. Most of the work we did, was way beyond anything you'd find in textbooks. I was under no illusion that I could hire folks that would be able to start on it right away.
That was why my team was always one that I wanted to keep whole and cohesive, over many years. I can't even imagine today's 18-month engineer lifetime. I kept my engineers for many years, and that wasn't easy.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#49Are mobile stacks so specialised that it's difficult to switch between them? Out of curiosity, how long would it take a flutter dev to become productive in some other stack?
Maybe I’m special (and it was 6-10 years ago), but after becoming proficient and pretty deep in osx/ios development I took an android project and it wasn’t obvious AT ALL. If it were a new job and not a project pushed to me at the same position I had, pretty sure it would be difficult to keep it.
Of course that depends on average expectations. Some people may learn and do and relax and still outperform if these are low.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#50Obviously I feel the pain of the OP but I think he blames the wrong thing. Flutter is a ( viable ) technology that’s being growing for the last few years. A very significant percentage of new mobile apps are programmed with it these days. It seems his problems have everything to do with the local job market and not the technology. With the added bonus that you can be a single man operation and release your own apps f…
As long as you don’t include in that number - most apps built by Google.
Is that actually true though? Most major Google apps predate Flutter. I was under the impression that a lot of their apps are either custom web view wrappers or native with shared C++ code for business logic.
Stadia and Google Pay are the only consumer facing Google apps I’m aware of that are made with Flutter.