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Software in 2014

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Re: Software in 2014

#21

Post by weixiyen »

coldtea wrote: post #19

Notice how everything he writes about mobile development is wrong? > First of all, you have to do your mobile development twice Nope, there are plenty of frameworks with large user bases, both OSS and with corporate backend to do it once. From Xamarin to PhoneGap. Especially 2D game developers are spoiled for choice. > The devices are memory-starved, CPU-starved, and battery-starved. The devices have never been bette…

I want to see some good Xamarin & PhoneGap apps, honestly the ones I've seen don't come close to natively built ones. Also if you are developing a game, you'd better stay far away from UIKit and do everything in OpenGL if you hope to get the same type of performance on Android using a translation tool.

The article is pretty much spot on. For most people who want to write great software, the client side is currently a mess.

Re: Software in 2014

#22

Post by xd »

thirdsight wrote: post #15
xd wrote: post #5

"It’s a pity some people still build important apps in PHP..." Getting real tired of seeing these baseless statements from so called software professionals. Here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of features of modern day PHP: * yield * event * pthreads - yeap, real threads. * closures (including support for $this) * consistent hashing api * "finally" added to try-catch * empty() now supports expressions, rather than…

Those are great features. However the objection people, including myself, have with PHP is that the legacy stuff is inconsistent junk. I still use it on occasion but it pains me.

PHP is making strides to remove legacy pain points. Check the changelogs i.e. http://php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.4.0

As to parameter ordering .. I've been using PHP for so long now that they've been memory to committed ;)

Re: Software in 2014

#23

Post by joe_fishfish »

lucaspiller wrote: post #10
hayksaakian wrote: post #4

I agree the client side situation is a mess, but I think its getting better. The biggest problem is the conflict of interest between the major browser makers in that they are also handheld device makers. They have every incentive to keep the browser dumb in order to keep devs using java/objc and staying on their platform. Firefox is really the only thing that has the influence and power to "save us" (obviously barrin…

That may be true with Apple (WebGL please?), but I haven't felt that way about Google before. I've always seen Android as a means to an end for them, to get more people using the web. Any further reading?

It's a means to an end for them in that it gets more people using their ecosystem, which means more personal data for them to harvest, which means ever-better targeted ads for people to click on, and ever-more-varied platforms on which to show said adverts.

Re: Software in 2014

#24

Post by enneff »

xd wrote: post #5

"It’s a pity some people still build important apps in PHP..." Getting real tired of seeing these baseless statements from so called software professionals. Here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of features of modern day PHP: * yield * event * pthreads - yeap, real threads. * closures (including support for $this) * consistent hashing api * "finally" added to try-catch * empty() now supports expressions, rather than…

So what? Part of the reason PHP is such a disgusting mess is because it is a raft of haphazardly accumulated features.

Re: Software in 2014

#25

Post by oe »

coldtea wrote: post #19

Notice how everything he writes about mobile development is wrong? > First of all, you have to do your mobile development twice Nope, there are plenty of frameworks with large user bases, both OSS and with corporate backend to do it once. From Xamarin to PhoneGap. Especially 2D game developers are spoiled for choice. > The devices are memory-starved, CPU-starved, and battery-starved. The devices have never been bette…

>The update cycles are slow. Days in the case of iOS ...

Last time I tried it was hours, although not instant as you might hope.

>What’s worse is that you can’t even count on people accepting the mobile-app updates you send them.

IOS7 tries to help this with automatic updating. Users still have the choice of updating but if you state in the release notes that it's a fix for "data-losing account-compromising privacy-infringing bug" they just might update.

Re: Software in 2014

#26

Post by coldtea »

thirdsight wrote: post #15
xd wrote: post #5

"It’s a pity some people still build important apps in PHP..." Getting real tired of seeing these baseless statements from so called software professionals. Here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of features of modern day PHP: * yield * event * pthreads - yeap, real threads. * closures (including support for $this) * consistent hashing api * "finally" added to try-catch * empty() now supports expressions, rather than…

Those are great features. However the objection people, including myself, have with PHP is that the legacy stuff is inconsistent junk. I still use it on occasion but it pains me.

PHP, especially post 5.2, is a flexible and battle tested language to do work in. It has some bad design choices inherited but nothing that you can't overcome and never have to think about again in a couple of weeks of learning the language.

Exactly like Javascript in this regard. I've been programming JS for over 15 years, and with the exception of cross browser support back in the day, there's nothing that had me startled after I learned the language -- except for a few issues related to floating point that I stumble upon now and then, but then that would be true for floating point math in any language.

The only PHP inconsistency is with the naming of the built-in functions. Functionality wise, most are solid bindings of respected C libraries. And, really, the needle/haystack thing has been blown out of all proportion. As if that's the biggest challenge one faces when programming.

Re: Software in 2014

#27

Post by glassx »

weixiyen wrote: post #21
coldtea wrote: post #19

Notice how everything he writes about mobile development is wrong? > First of all, you have to do your mobile development twice Nope, there are plenty of frameworks with large user bases, both OSS and with corporate backend to do it once. From Xamarin to PhoneGap. Especially 2D game developers are spoiled for choice. > The devices are memory-starved, CPU-starved, and battery-starved. The devices have never been bette…

I want to see some good Xamarin & PhoneGap apps, honestly the ones I've seen don't come close to natively built ones. Also if you are developing a game, you'd better stay far away from UIKit and do everything in OpenGL if you hope to get the same type of performance on Android using a translation tool. The article is pretty much spot on. For most people who want to write great software, the client side is currently a…

There's an App Showcase on Xamarin's website: http://xamarin.com/apps

Out of those, I use Rdio daily and played Bastion a lot and they work great. I didn't know they were made with Mono until now.

Re: Software in 2014

#28

Post by thirdsight »

If only Windows Phone had a greater market share. Despite being a UNIX guy I quite like it plus according to my colleagues (both of which are iOS and Android defectors respectively): You get to use a decent language (C#), Tooling is good and free, Apps are really scary fast, Unit testing is possible, One form factor, Approval is very fast and you can make money as the market isn't saturated to the point the SNR is against you.

Re: Software in 2014

#29

Post by fit2rule »

The client-side mess? I just use MOAI. Lua is a lovely language, and the MOAI engine itself is so well thought out, that I can manage to build our client apps for Windows, Linux, MacOSX, Android, iOS, Chrome NaCL, and even HTML5+JS target platforms. With the exact same code.

At this point I just don't see any point to doing things natively. Actually, the tools that MOAI provides (and some of the other community frameworks that sit on top of MOAI, such as Hanappe or Flower) are decent enough, and contain all the basics, to implement pretty much any of the fancy GUI interactions seen elsewhere. And the appeal of being able to write an application that works - and looks the same - on all of the above platforms is just too great; in spite of the investment in learning a 'non-standard' framework, and in spite of the fact of nobody else knowing much about it (and thus no google'able answers to dodgy questions), I still feel this is the right direction to go. Especially since MOAI is open-source, and you can put the host VM anywhere you are capable (technical competence-wise) of doing it.

So I don't do native development for Apps any more. My ObjC/Java/C/C++ chops are still highly useful, but these chops are being used in a different context now: instead of writing a native app in one of these languages, I just write a host - and then use Lua to do the app logic. This is just so fun, I hope everyone starts doing it soon. ;P

Re: Software in 2014

#30

Post by coldtea »

weixiyen wrote: post #21
coldtea wrote: post #19

Notice how everything he writes about mobile development is wrong? > First of all, you have to do your mobile development twice Nope, there are plenty of frameworks with large user bases, both OSS and with corporate backend to do it once. From Xamarin to PhoneGap. Especially 2D game developers are spoiled for choice. > The devices are memory-starved, CPU-starved, and battery-starved. The devices have never been bette…

I want to see some good Xamarin & PhoneGap apps, honestly the ones I've seen don't come close to natively built ones. Also if you are developing a game, you'd better stay far away from UIKit and do everything in OpenGL if you hope to get the same type of performance on Android using a translation tool. The article is pretty much spot on. For most people who want to write great software, the client side is currently a…

>I want to see some good Xamarin & PhoneGap apps, honestly the ones I've seen don't come close to natively built ones.

I don't know, what's bad about these http://xamarin.com/apps , e.g. Rdio which I've used and is fine?

Xamarin is a binding to Cocoa and other libs, it doesn't recreate any UI itself. So the "don't come close to natively built ones" doesn't even make sense from a technical standpoint. Not to mention that C# is compiled AOT.

>The article is pretty much spot on. For most people who want to write great software, the client side is currently a mess.

The article isn't even about those people in the first place. He even laments that "UX-quality bar on mobile is high" as a reason why mobile sucks.

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