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I’m done with the web

randyluecke.tumblr.com

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Re: I’m done with the web

#281

Post by kybernetyk »

smacktoward wrote: post #29
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 more like the ease of Web programming opened up programming to an entire new slice of the population that would never have had the opportunity to become programmers before. These people don't have computer science degrees, so they spend a lot of time reinventing wheels. But lots of it works well enough despite all that, and as time passes, they learn and get better. The messiness is a good sign, not a bad one. T…

> Thirty years ago these people would have had no options other than to be passive consumers of software other people made

Really? Thirty years ago many of the most popular home computers booted directly into a BASIC interpreter.

Programming hasn't become more or less accessible with the web. You just write JavaScript instead of BASIC nowadays.

Re: I’m done with the web

#282

Post by moron4hire »

straws wrote: post #269
gfodor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Necessary but not sufficient. I've worked with a lot of very experienced, very persistent people, and I'm sure they even had good taste, but they were shitty coders. In fact, their persistence was a requirement for them to be able to get their jobs done at all, given how bad they were.

Re: I’m done with the web

#283

Post by thomas_h »

I think you have to make a few distinctions that recognize both different developer backgrounds and developer aspirations. It's like one of those "magic quadrants" that analysts love:

On the horizontal axis you'd have developer background: HTML/CSS/JS - OO Programmer On the vertical axis you'd have target application: Web Page - GUI-like App

Web pages are about text, color, images, layouts and maybe animations - in short "appearance". Page breaks are ok. GUI apps are about controls/forms, lists, tables, trees, to interact with a backend - in short, they're about "functionality". Page breaks in a GUI app are disruptive and are therefore avoided.

HTML guys hate latency, they're used to the most direct effects. OO guys usually don't mind to invest time before coming up with effects. HTML guys often shy away from learning a new programming language; it's important that they can apply the same skill set over and over again. OO guys don't mind to learn a new language, but don't like to miss out on paradigms and patterns they value.

Cappuccion would be in the upper right quadrant (OO Programmer / GUI App), while e.g. jQuery would be in the lower left ( HTML/CSS/JS background / Web Page). Probably, the crowd behind the HTML/CSS/JS profile is larger than the OO programmer crowd. And the amount of effort spent on web pages with spiced-up appearance is larger than that of carefully crafted rich internet clients.

But probably both have their relevance, so why trash one in favor of the other?! For someone advertising on the web a slick appearance is prime, while a vendor of set top-boxes values reliability of their web-based configuration GUI. The real problem arises, and that is probably Randy's pain, when the wrong technology and skill set is applied to a given problem.

Re: I’m done with the web

#284

Post by pifflesnort »

dreamfactory wrote: post #274
pifflesnort wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are 'spam and search' difficult-to-impossible in a native app? For that matter, why are you equating 'the web' and 'server-side'? The standads IMAP protocol stores messages server-side while also enabling effecient server-side search. The standard managesieve protocol implements support for managing server-side filters from remote clients. Tools such as SpamAssassin perform intelligent per-user filtering server-s…

For one thing Spamassassin is quite hopeless compared to Gmail's filter (and yes I have compared). But more to the point I would absolutely equate web with server-side hosted app. For example, if you want to implement decent search it's probably going to be Lucene-based. So if you are just talking thin-client presentation layer, the app isn't really native in any case - the acid test for a non-web app is whether it w…

I'm pretty confused. Are you saying that my mail client is non-native because it uses IMAP server-side search?

Even though it caches all e-mail locally, works offline, and it is a native app?

Re: I’m done with the web

#285

Post by fusiongyro »

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…

This is interesting enough you should write it up as a blog post and submit it. You're not going to get the discussion you deserve posting something this interesting deep in a thread on a tangentially related article.

Re: I’m done with the web

#286

Post by dylanks2 »

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…

I've been feeling similar to the way you feel for about 9 years, but with Dojo rather than Cappuccino. I stopped worrying or caring about fighting trends I cannot control years ago because it doesn't matter. I focus on building a toolkit that people use to build apps that require solid architecture and APIs. If I spent all of my time listening to or worrying about every critic or every person that doesn't get the power of having something more robust, then I would never make progress and would fail our users. You're not alone in your perspective. And yes, we were indeed all impressed with 280 Slides when it first launched.

Re: I’m done with the web

#287

Post by schmidtty »

You offered unsolicited advice. Now its my turn to do the same and its really simple: Pipe the fuck down. Grow the fuck up. CHILL the fuck out.

Interestingly, I do agree with some of your points.

Re: I’m done with the web

#288

Post by moron4hire »

sergiosgc wrote: post #259
moron4hire wrote: post #20

This is a big part of why I left Web dev, too. I'm just sick of working with amateurs. When I'm at work, I have things I want to get done. This isn't the classroom, my teammates' lack of comprehension of even things as simple as dependency injection and MVC is their fault, not mine. My productivity and coding power shouldn't have to be hampered just because I'm working with a bunch of code-until-it-works-sorta hacks.

Oh, the MVC pattern again. Here, take one of these: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2013/03/03/the-controller-pattern-...

You have to know how MVC works before you get to decide not to use it.

Re: I’m done with the web

#289

Post by kybernetikos »

corresation wrote: post #206
dxbydt wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ?…

Yup, I build software for the financial market too. Years ago we were struggling to persuade companies that they should use html instead of sliverlight or flash. Last year, they pretty much all realised at once that they'd built millions of dollars worth of key software in dead technologies (and often struggled too). They're all back now, wanting products and help with their HTML/JS.

Re: I’m done with the web

#290

Post by nkassis »

IheartApplesDix wrote: post #233
dbenhur wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The executable code is compiled into binary that directly correlates to the copper wires (and etched semi-conductors, or perhaps even vacuum tubes) of the specific, real, tangible machine intended to execute the code. You do realize it's been a while time since the ostensible instruction set and corresponding assembly language of most modern CPUs translated directly to the bare metal execution model of the machine.…

>On current chips, x86 machine code is as much a virtual machine as java byte-code. I understand what you're trying to say, but this is way off base. x86 instructions may not align exactly a processor's primitive operations, but that doesn't mean abstraction makes x86 similar to the JVM, at least not anymore than it is similar to a Bible printed on papyrus. But nobody cares if ancient Hebrew is just as much a virtual…

You should leave out the stfu next time. You comment stand on it's own without it.
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