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I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

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Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#181
post #33
post #6

Earlier 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).

I don't even know how to write a linked list in Rust... Dang! I'm doomed... :o)

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#182

Dart 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…

I don't understand why this language exists. It just feels like a promotion vehicle by someone at Google who had enough clout to then get it shoehorned in to Flutter. If they had gone with JavaScript they could've made the switch to TypeScript later on. I realise this is being said with the benefit of hindsight but Flutter would be in a far better place today I suspect.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#183

So what would be the best mobile development setup for someone who: - prefers to work in a Unix-like environment (e.g. Linux); - prefers to code in Vim; - prefers to have a single unified codebase for different mobile platforms; - prefers to test applications on a Linux machine running an X server.

MacOS is Unix, and it’s pretty much the only option if you want to target iOS.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#184
post #161

I 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.

Any particular reason you chose wxWidgets over QT ?

I don't want to get into the complexity of Qt licenses ever, and wxWidgets does everything I need so far, plus it's 100% open source and free to use. the new release 3.2 is pretty good and it's also smaller than Qt ecosystem, which means much easier for me to learn and start to make releases.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#185
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not iOS, but I'm fairly confident I could be productive in an Android codebase in a week. The only reason I don't think I could do iOS is because I'd need to use a OSX, and I think it would take me longer to become productive in OSX. It also depends on what you mean by "productive", would I want to lead a team to create a new app from scratch? Probably not. Go into an existing app and start fixing bugs and creating n…

> It also depends on what you mean by "productive", would I want to lead a team to create a new app from scratch? Probably not. Go into an existing app and start fixing bugs and creating new features? Sure. As someone with experience, are you actually applying for jobs where you would just be pulling stories off the board doing “feature work”? And let’s take your example. What’s the chance of me being productively ab…

If your resume shows you job hop regularly, then I’m going to want you to be productive very quickly.

If your resume gives me the impression that you are likely to still be working here for enough years, then I’ll give you time to get up to speed. If you were a really great front end developer in 2015, I suspect you can figure out Typescript/React.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#186

Why are people so obsessed with hyper specializing in software development? Labeling yourself a react dev or rails dev or flutter dev or whatever is only going to limit your growth and options. Your career will outlive many tech stacks. Tech changes quickly. Never stop learning.

[deleted]

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#187
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of jobs that will let you do that. Most of them will not be writing software that is built on X.

So? What’s your point?

Your choice of text editor is largely irrelevant to your job. Picking a legacy tech stack to work in is not.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#188
post #182

Dart 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…

I don't understand why this language exists. It just feels like a promotion vehicle by someone at Google who had enough clout to then get it shoehorned in to Flutter. If they had gone with JavaScript they could've made the switch to TypeScript later on. I realise this is being said with the benefit of hindsight but Flutter would be in a far better place today I suspect.

It compiles AOT to native code and supports tree shaking. It also has JIT mode with hot reloading/restarting. It has sound null safety and is statically typed.

It's not a bad language. It just lacks some needed features. They'll probably get implemented over a span of a few years.

Ecosystem is small, but at least there's FFI interop.

It also has some baggage from it's early days when it was meant as JavaScript replacement. Since we now have WASM (and soon WASM-GC) I think it would be best, if compilation to JS would be dropped, so more low level features can be implemented.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also depends on what you mean by "productive", would I want to lead a team to create a new app from scratch? Probably not. Go into an existing app and start fixing bugs and creating new features? Sure. As someone with experience, are you actually applying for jobs where you would just be pulling stories off the board doing “feature work”? And let’s take your example. What’s the chance of me being productively ab…

If your resume shows you job hop regularly, then I’m going to want you to be productive very quickly. If your resume gives me the impression that you are likely to still be working here for enough years, then I’ll give you time to get up to speed. If you were a really great front end developer in 2015, I suspect you can figure out Typescript/React.

I sucked back then too at front end development :).

I knew enough to copy/paste/pattern match an existing page and make the necessary change. But you start me with a blank slate and give me a mock-up, I would end up using tables and frames like it’s 1999.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#190
post #15

I 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…

>don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast.

This is such a funny mantra. Okay learn how nuclear fission works. Or EUV lithography. Or power transmission across superconductors. All of these are extant, commercial, technologies (yes even the last one). Too much? How about something more pedestrian like overhead cams and electric fuel injection? Too far afield? Okay learn how DMA works on a GPU - not how to call `copy(host, device)` but what actually happens and more importantly why.

The truth is software developers learn APIs, not technologies (and not over breakfast either). Point being, it's not good to be haughty because if tomorrow you were out of a job and the only place hiring was the Ford motor plant I think you'd be just as fucked as the author of the post.

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