I’m done with the web • Hacker News Board

Re: I’m done with the web

#201

Post by randomdata » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:34 PM UTC

xradionut wrote: post #106

crazygringo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Web programming can be fundamentally different from application programming. Application programming tends to be far more complex, far more planned, and far slower. Applications last for years and years, and new releases might take multiple years. Whereas web programming can be extremely experimental, prototype-y, with multiple releases a day . It's also vastly faster to program. This isn't an argument ag…

"Application programming tends to be far more complex, far more planned, and far slower. Applications last for years and years, and new releases might take multiple years." Really? You can build non-web apps just as fast as web apps. There are decades of tools and programmer experience doing this daily. You can't build Autocad or Photoshop as quick as you can churn out a buggy Rails site, but that's comparing apples…

> You can build non-web apps just as fast as web apps.

I expect the underlying point was that most popular native platforms today almost force you into best practices which does add some upfront cost.

On the web you can throw up a single page PHP script full of SQL injection vulnerabilities and Javascript spaghetti and you are off the races. There is generally no equivalent for a modern GUI system. You typically need to start with a full MVC infrastructure in order to even begin to interface with the system libraries.

When you take care to craft your website using the same best practices the differences become negligible, but a large number of developers do not care about architecture and can take shortcuts that make it feel like they are moving faster.

Re: I’m done with the web

#202

Post by jacoblyles » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:41 PM UTC

Irregardless wrote: post #149

> Google Now is one of the most exciting pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long time. It’s solving problems that couldn’t be solved four years ago. Showing people sports scores and traffic reports before they ask for them? Well, at least that gives us an accurate picture of your perspective (or lack thereof). The Galaxy Nexus is the best phone I've ever used or owned, but I couldn't possibly care less about Now. It…

From a product perspective, I can't see how it is exciting or new. Maybe there are some fancy gears under the hood, though.

I don't have it on my Nexus 4. If I left on all the notifications apps on my phone, I would be getting one every 2 or 3 minutes. I don't need another.

Re: I’m done with the web

#203

Post by porker » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:46 PM UTC

Earlier today I was talking to another dev, and we were both wishing for a system like Delphi 7 for the web, with vcl and a vibrant ecosystem of 3rd party components (we were discussing how much SaaS leads to reinventing the wheel).

After 12 years in web dev, I feel his pain.

Re: I’m done with the web

#204

Post by taeric » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:47 PM UTC

pablasso wrote: post #173

Irregardless wrote: post #149

> Google Now is one of the most exciting pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long time. It’s solving problems that couldn’t be solved four years ago. Showing people sports scores and traffic reports before they ask for them? Well, at least that gives us an accurate picture of your perspective (or lack thereof). The Galaxy Nexus is the best phone I've ever used or owned, but I couldn't possibly care less about Now. It…

That's shortsighted, this is what Google Now, can do.. well, right now. But in the future it will be extended to make your life easier, i.e tell you when you get close to a cinema that is displaying a movie of a director that you like, telling you that this near theater is performing a show that you really liked 2 years ago, etc.

These are not exactly stellar examples. The ones that I've seen that are good are:

  * Let you know that meeting you have will be tough to make it to due to traffic/you haven't left yet.
  * ...

Ok, so there is really only one good use case I know of. The others are items that, if I am not searching for it, I don't think I really want to know about it.

So, can you give some good expansions of that etc?

Re: I’m done with the web

#205

Post by camus » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:49 PM UTC

Objective-J is not the problem itself , the problem is that Cappucino is very hard to debug in the browser itself. I went through the tutorial , had an error , and there was no way i could know where it came from.

I dont have a mac right now so i cant use the builder , but i dont think that Cappucino failed because it is bloated. I use Haxe which is even more bloated than Cappucino. Yet Haxe allows me to debug a JS app directly in the browser with source maps , Haxe has a very smart and powerfull compiler.

Maybe it is matter of timing. But i think it is just a matter of tools. Again Obj-J is not horrible to work with. And Capp apps are definetly neat.

Re: I’m done with the web

#206

Post by corresation » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:51 PM UTC

dxbydt wrote: post #192

corresation wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. Re-read that again and seriously think about it, because comments such as yours don't accept that simple reality. Do you contest it? Do you argue that the web somehow circumvented the competition? For 15 years I've been promoting the web with groups that I've…

>The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. What utter BS. You are essentially celebrating the victory of consumer commerce, not technology X over technology Y. Think about it. There never was any battle between the "Web" and "MFC, Java Applets, Webstart, .NET, Flash, Silverlight". Those thing survive & even thrive in places where nothing else would do. Do you really think everybody in…

"You are essentially celebrating the victory of consumer commerce, not technology X over technology Y."

It isn't celebrating to point out a reality of the world relative to a post that seems to imagine that every other solution was handicapped in the race. And it IS completely based upon technical merit.

"Do you really think everybody in investment banks & brokerages fire up their browser first thing in the morning ? 99% of what they did, do & will continue to do, will continue to be done via native apps - mostly C#, C++, .NET & Java apps."

Humorously I build software for the financial market. Our presentation tiers are almost entirely through web apps. The competitors I was talking about -- the ones who poured cement on their own feet -- went the "thick client" route. And we keep on iterating.

"The web is just the tip of the iceberg."

Yes. No kidding. I'm not building a database in the DOM. I'm not processing trades in JavaScript. This discussion is about the presentation tier. Every criticism of the web always holds that you could toss together something so much better in some illusory, never proven alternative, but that simply isn't true.

Re: I’m done with the web

#207

Post by buu700 » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:54 PM UTC

buzzWerdzGalore wrote: post #191

criley wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I die a little bit inside. " Every time I hear a programmer condescend towards other programmers for using a higher level language, I also die a little bit inside. How is javascript not the "metal" of the web? It's a core part of the modern web experience upon which many libraries and frameworks have been built. I don't understand why that analogy is bad and is worthy of your condescension. Are you just being conde…

PFFFT! A language interpreted at runtime, by an application that runs inside an operating system (which may or may not be virtualized) that boots into protected mode. Let me get this straight, you're ostensibly describing this as being "bare metal"? Have you ever heard the terms "kernel mode" or "ring zero"? Oh wait, you qualified it as "the 'metal' of the web"... so it's an "analogy". Sorry to be pedantic, but when…

You're really reading too much into his analogy; it was a quick informal way to get a point across and everyone (should have?) understood what he meant.

Re: I’m done with the web

#208

Post by chrisdevereux » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:56 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #102

pifflesnort wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thirty years ago these people would have had no options other than to be passive consumers of software other people made. Not exactly: https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.hypercard/brows... (That was 26 years ago, and HyperCard was far more accessible to non-computer scientists than the web is or has been). It's a mistake to think that because the web is popular, that one can draw directly from it axioms r…

I'm old enough to have used HyperCard, and while it was an excellent environment, it had some serious barriers to entry. For instance, using it required an expensive development kit, namely a Mac. Back in 1987 even a lowly Mac Plus would cost you $2,500, which in today's dollars is more than $5,000. Contrast that to the Web, which you can author for on the oldest, crustiest commodity hardware you please and where eve…

Your first argument seems to undermine your second argument.

Re: I’m done with the web

#209

Post by pifflesnort » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:57 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #124

pifflesnort wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm old enough to have used HyperCard, and while it was an excellent environment, it had some serious barriers to entry. For instance, using it required an expensive development kit, namely a Mac. Back in 1987 even a lowly Mac Plus would cost you $2,500, which in today's dollars is more than $5,000. Contrast that to the Web, which you can author for on the oldest, crustiest commodity hardware you please and where e…

"Any computer was not cheap in 1987, much less one that sported a usable GUI environment that could run something on par with HyperCard. That had nothing to do with HyperCard." True, but (1) PCs were significantly cheaper than Macs, and (2) many, many more people already had PCs on their desks than had Macs. So unless you were one of the few who already had a Mac, getting started with HyperCard meant plunking down mo…

Your examples all explain market forces that led to the web's rise -- rather than technological reasons.

> True, but (1) PCs were significantly cheaper than Macs, and (2) many, many more people already had PCs on their desks than had Macs. So unless you were one of the few who already had a Mac, getting started with HyperCard meant plunking down money for new hardware.

In 1987, the web wasn't invented yet, and Windows 1.0 was the best the PC had to offer. This had some interesting results in the marketplace, but doesn't really explain much other than the fact that there's value in cross-platform implementations.

Apple wasn't interested in making HyperCard/Claris cross-platform, so they didn't.

> Again true, but irrelevant. We're talking about contemporary mindshare, and starting in the early '90s HyperCard and the Web were competing against each other in real time. HyperCard had a long head start and yet even by 1995 (the year Netscape 1.0 broke out) it was clear the Web had all the momentum.

I remember that time quite clearly, and until the mid-to-late 90s, HyperCard and the web were in COMPLETELY different spaces.

People were building complex enterprise database-backed applications on top of HyperCard; meanwhile, on the web, we had static pages, and post-1993, if you were lucky, CGI-based e-mail forms and visit counters.

Even with the introduction of JavaScript in 1995, we didn't see much other than rotating banners in the status bar until much later. Simply put, the web was not being used for applications at that time.

By the time the web did "break out" in 1995, Apple had moved HyperCard to their Claris subsidiary, stopped producing updates, and started charging for the authoring tools (a funny thing to do, given that HyperCard had always been Smalltalk-like in combining authoring and consumption).

Essentially, the lack of updates and unreasonable pricing led to its demise. These are market forces, not technological ones, and do nothing to disprove that 26 years ago, there were tools accessible to normal humans.

Re: I’m done with the web

#210

Post by STRML » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 7:00 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #162

STRML wrote: post #68

Personally, batteries-included frameworks like Cappuccino scare me off for a few reasons: 1. I have to learn Objective-J. I've been web programming for years and I've become really good at Javascript. I even enjoy it. Other frameworks don't require learning a new language. 2. Time spent learning Cappuccino is only good for programming Cappuccino apps. Time spent in micro frameworks generally translates to other frame…

> I have to learn Objective-J. Objective-J is a Javascript superset, so everything you know about Javascript is still available to you. It will take minutes to learn the additions. The language is not really the problem. Its the framework that will take quite some time to learn. There are a ton of interfaces to work with. I suspect that is why you feel more comfortable with something like Backbone, because it basical…

You're right. I'm not an Apple dev so I don't see much of the utility but I'm sure there are many who do. Certainly, if I were a native iOS programmer looking to do a rich web app, Cappuccino would be my first choice.

All of these frameworks fulfill a need (otherwise they wouldn't exist). I think the author expected that, because Cappuccino filled his needs so well, that it would fill everyone else's. He is now venting his frustration that this is not true.