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I’m done with the web

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Re: I’m done with the web

#261

Post by cleverleap »

Me1000 wrote: post #236

Author here: First off, thank you all for the comments! Also, thank you Paul for posting this and helping me articulate my thoughts while writing it! Finally, thank you to everyone who has wished me success in my future endeavors. Although I expected this post would step on some toes and anger several people (although I tried my best not to), I'm happily surprised by the reaction in general. HN tends towards the nega…

Conservative part here :). What's good about polyglot programming? Abstracting JavaScript with Objective-J? Or even abstracting HTML with JavaScript? I do not understand these tendencies to bring desktop software development practices to the web. It is different environment. You will never get to level of precision when hacking prebuilt widgets.

On the other hand I think that if the front-end is written in HAML instead of HTML, Coffee Script or Objective-J instead of JavaScript will not make application any better. It's often good usability and backend services which matter.

Re: I’m done with the web

#262

Post by espivi »

Me1000 wrote: post #236

Author here: First off, thank you all for the comments! Also, thank you Paul for posting this and helping me articulate my thoughts while writing it! Finally, thank you to everyone who has wished me success in my future endeavors. Although I expected this post would step on some toes and anger several people (although I tried my best not to), I'm happily surprised by the reaction in general. HN tends towards the nega…

Stagnation of the community ? The reason why I did not consider about cappuccino is that I heard of another "new awesome framework which solves all problems" three days later. I would be delighted if the community could stagnate so I can catch up. You told about "reinventing the wheel", and that is exactly what you have done with Cappuccino no matter what you were thinking when designing it.

It may be great stuff, developers have no time for this. I can't afford losing 2 weeks of work learning a new framework which hypothetically makes me a bit more productive. Micro libraries are not a "trend" and file size is not the problem. We just want to know quickly what is behind the tools we are going to use and why using these tools matters.

Re: I’m done with the web

#263

Post by GnarlinBrando »

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…

"comparing apples to oranges" that is kind of the whole point here.

Most of the arguments in this thread are coming from two totally different perspectives. Some holding doggedly to various ideals and dogmas and instead of trying to learn the new domain, they try and make the apples look like oranges. This never works. Most are right about this or that when it comes to the domain that they are experienced in, but when economics forces people into a new problem space some don't try and learn the new space as a thing in and of itself, instead they try and adapt their methodologies and abstract to a different problem space they are more familiar with. That is where these conflicts come from.

Re: I’m done with the web

#264

Post by GnarlinBrando »

zevyoura wrote: post #121
jacquesm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in banking, telco, cad/cam and embedded systems. Nowhere, and I really mean that, was the tech as botched as it has been on the web past the early days.

To be fair, those are all systems with a drastically higher cost of failure than general web development.

Not to mention being developed in totally different environments than your average website, application, or framework.

Re: I’m done with the web

#266

Post by GnarlinBrando »

tantaman wrote: post #97
jacquesm wrote: post #2

> The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. That's spot on. You can add in to that that all the lessons of the process of developing software have also been discarded and are slowly being re-learned. It is as if with the birth of the web the…

It's not that there was a complete reboot of IT. It's that web solutions are just now being applied to problems we already solved years ago in other industries (telco, defense). The web wasn't originally intended to be used to provide native like experiences and so the foundations for that just weren't there. So yes, people had to re-invent and re-discover all those desktop frameworks but this time in a javascript &…

Even as someone relatively new to development and a native of the web this seems so clear to me. The web was originally just a way of sharing documents. It is both a miracle and heresy that we have managed to do so much with it. We could very well do with some foundational rethinking of what the web is beyond all the web 2.0 buzzwords.

That said, I have never understood the driving need for desktop like frameworks. The problems that ubiquitusly networked applications and communications technology face are nothing like those of kernel code, commandline applications, or modern applications like CAD Photoshop. All the things you mention that need fixing desperately need it, but I don't think a desktop like framework/library/standard for the web will ever 'win' because the web is not trying to solve the problem of a virtual desktop, it is trying to solve the problem of a non-homogeneous ubiquitously networked data exchange layer.

Re: I’m done with the web

#267

Post by alaskamiller »

anon1385 wrote: post #221
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The examples of genuinely great web applications are few and far between, if not near non-existent. Are Google Apps really the best the web has to offer? Every good web application beats its desktop rivals simply by being ubiquitious. People who dismiss the web typically ignore this simple fact completely. But it's always been true, you can look back to 1997 when Yahoo Mail killed the desktop email client business…

(Apologies for the big rant, these are some ideas that have been rattling about in my head recently and your post made some things clearer in my mind. It's not meant to be a post of factual 'truths', but an explanation for my (and perhaps others) reaction against the web as the one platform to rule them all. So it's as much an emotional gut reaction as a logical one. ) I think this (desire for ubiquity/multi-platform…

Interesting perspective and good food for thought.

My one point would be perhaps the way things are now is because it's good enough. Using the web and building for it is good enough for a lot of people, the speed bumps and systems in place are good enough for the majority.

But I do agree, we've gotten to a point where a handful of corporations dictate how everyone else get to do the neutron dance and that the bleeding edge needs to be examined and worked on so that change can occur.

Re: I’m done with the web

#268

Post by alaskamiller »

vyrotek wrote: post #159
pifflesnort wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they? That's what iOS 1.0 did. There were no native apps, just web apps that had cute icons that launched a specific URL. People tried very hard to make that work. It didn't. The breadth and depth of mobile applications we see today only occurred once Apple provided a native SDK. The reasons for this…

I think Palm & WebOS were on the right track by making their native apps still based on web technnologies. As far as I know there weren't any mobile inputs that those apps couldn't handle. Blaming limitations on tech seems silly. The decision was a business one. Besides that, why take away the ability to create webbased apps? Could we not have the option if I know I don't care about any of the fancy stuff. There are…

You're talking about 2011 storylines.

There were plenty of discussions about HTML5 vs native mobile apps. Big companies like Google and Facebook extolled HTML5, partly because they needed leverage against Apple's stronghold over the dominate ecosystem. So yes, the decision was a business one to begin with.

Then when reality didn't fit their agenda they've all since switched positions in 2012. Facebook rebuilding their iOS app with Obj-C, for example, to be as fast as possible. So then the decision ultimately became a technical one.

Maybe it'll flip flopped around soon. We did go through a period in the 90's when CD drives came out and everyone rushed in to deliver as much multimedia content on CDs as possible before that industry died and gave way to the ubiquity of the Internet.

In the future, smart phones are the CDs.

Re: I’m done with the web

#269

Post by straws »

gfodor wrote: post #126
freehunter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point seems to be that the web is cool and hip, which attracts people without computer science backgrounds. Without a solid footing in software design fundamentals, "hack it until it works" seems like a perfectly valid way to run a development cycle. The desktop is not cool or hip, so the people doing it tend to be people who really want to be there, not chasing trends. It's a vast oversimplification of the situa…

I don't know about anyone else, but I learned almost nothing about software design when getting my computer science degree.

CS degrees are not a catch-all. Most teach data structures, algorithms, a little AI and database theory. Few teach how to structure programs.

I'm pretty sick of the "I work with people without CS degrees" excuse. Good software design really comes down to experience, persistence, and taste.

Re: I’m done with the web

#270

Post by dreamfactory »

w0utert wrote: post #164
corresation wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a…

>> I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a bro…

> the fact that e.g. Google Mail (which is a great web application) is considered superior to e.g. something like Sparrow is quite frankly very amazing

It's a good example actually. Even considering the less pretty UI, Google Mail is superior to Sparrow precisely because it is web-based. From the user's side, the way it deals with spam and search are two huge functional advantages which would be difficult to impossible in a native app. And from the vendor's side, the ability to manage updates and monetise through ads are clear benefits which keep the program running.

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