I’m done with the web

The landscape is littered with C frameworks, C++ frameworks, Java frameworks, .NET frameworks, and so on for every other language, that serves to abstract so much from the basics that it becomes so difficult to do basic things the -way. The problem is that instead of being ancillary and supporting productivity, they are opinionated and try to do EVERYTHING for you, which just makes them really crappy DSLs.

This just happens to occur on the web a lot more because what we have to work with is inconsistent, sometimes poorly implemented, and confusing as hell to new players. So everyone and their dog tries to "solve" developing web applications by making you believe the DOM doesn't exist (jQuery, MooTools, etc). Some think HTML and CSS are too complicated and try to get you to believe those don't exist either (Ext, etc). Then some want you to forget that Javascript ever existed, or to make Javascript less Javascripty (GWT, Prototype/MooTools, etc).

The end result is a lot of opinionated dogma that rarely actually help us get things done (or get in the way more than help). If you pick a big framework, it's usually very good at whatever it was designed to build. But if you want to build something even slightly outside of that set, it becomes a massive cluster-fuck of WTF-inducing horrifying debugging and pain. Only the lightweight libraries that are massive value adds without enforcing a specific dogma on the user have been extremely successful.

The problem is that everyone is too opinionated and makes their software try to do your job for you. It's not really about the ease of use, it's about the ease of integration, extension, and whether they make our jobs easier or nightmarish. Yes, the web foundation is far from perfect, or even great, but most of these frameworks are far, far worse, since they massively and arbitrarily limit what you can do for the sake of some vision of simplicity.

The same problem exists in the native world. There is no consistent presentation layer that rivals the web, and even it isn't fully consistent (all browsers are different, and even the same browser on different platforms can behave differently). But it's a far cry from anything else.

As an aside, since JS isn't assembly, using it as a compile target to build applications foregoes a lot of the other fundamental technologies in a web browser. Sure, you might be able to compile into JS and have an application run in the browser, but that necessarily implies you're doing things like building the DOM manually, and sites like this tend to have significant performance issues. If you want it to work well, the best way currently is by using HTML/CSS/JS and by not letting a gigantic framework pretend that those things don't exist.

But I think the open web will win in the end, not because of any inherent technical advantage (in some ways it's behind native apps still in terms of performance, look and feel etc), but because the open web has so many advantages for developers and users that in the end it will overcome its disadvantages. Performance and UIS are improving constantly on the web (contrary to the opinion of this poster), so the gap is narrowing. At some point the performance won't matter, offline web work will become possible, the network will be fast and ubiquitous enough and the advantages of the open web will come to the fore.

As a developer of web apps and mobile apps, the contrast between deploying a few fixes a day to a website, and working hard on new app versions only to have them rejected by an anonymous gatekeeper at Apple, often for inscrutable and unjustified reasons, then waiting days or weeks for approval, could not be more marked. Things are easier on the desktop, but there are still far more hurdles to deployment, and that matters a lot, as you hint above. The only thing I really miss on the web is a great language to script web pages in, but that will come (js is not my favourite language), and you can use any language you want on the backend, and no-one need know.

As a user, the advantages of the open web (i.e. not walled gardens like Facebook) will I think have an irresistible pull - advantages like linkable, shareable content, content on any device, even unforeseen ones, not having to rebuy apps but just subscribing once and accessing content from anywhere. The fact that the web is not controlled by a single vendor as most commercial operating systems or devices are is an added bonus.

Finally, I'd argue that the radical simplicity of web technology is actually its greatest strength, as it means it can be deployed almost anywhere, even with limited resources, and give at least some value to users for decades and over any new devices which come out, as opposed to the binaries being created for current platforms which in a decade will be forgotten or dumped by their vendor in favour of the newest flavour of opendoc, .Net, whatever... I find it fascinating that the web delivers consistently better results by virtue of keeping the tech simple and backwards compatible.

Worse is better after all.

"Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call 'vocation.' But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves...to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life." -- Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The web is a very viscous place with all kinds of competition. Philosophically speaking, that form of competition can rob one of a chance at true mastery.