Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software in 2014

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 265 posts

Re: Software in 2014

#41

Post by andyjohnson0 »

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…

Which Xamarin apps that you've seen don't look native?

As others have pointed out, Xamarin provides C# bindings for the native APIs. It is fundamentally different to Phonegap, which takes a lowest-common-denominator Java/Swing approach.

Re: Software in 2014

#42

Post by icebraining »

gaius wrote: post #31
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 best phone I ever owned was a Nokia 6310i, and I had to charge it only once, occasionally twice a week. Now with all the advances in battery technology, phones barely last a day and there's a thriving market in external batteries and portable chargers. If I am not using any of the "smart" features on my smartphone, just calls and texts, I would expect it to last longer than that old Nokia, but I might get at best…

the consumer has just been forced to get used to it.

Have they? Why? Nokia still sells feature phones with good battery life. Hell, the new 105 lasts a month(!) on a single charge and you can get it on ebay for $30+shipping.

Nobody is forcing anything, people just like smartphones.

Re: Software in 2014

#43

Post by grey-area »

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…

baseless statements from so called software professionals

You're calling this guy[1] a 'so-called software professional' because he criticised PHP?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray

Re: Software in 2014

#44

Post by rejschaap »

mojuba wrote: post #14

Software engineers are typically good at building things meant for other engineers. That's why some of the most robust, rock-solid, reliable pieces of software engineering are, e.g. OS kernels and language compilers. So Tim Bray is right in saying that we needn't worry about the server side. The server side is in good hands. Also true that the client side sucks, and I see only one way of fixing it: engineers have to…

"... is meant for humans, not engineers"

Engineers are humans... most of them anyway... I think.

"Software engineers are typically good at building things meant for other engineers."

You're not capturing the essence though, software engineers use Android as well as Linux on their desktops. I think it's more the way they approach user-interfaces. Engineers tend to reason from the bottom-up, but for good product design you also need to reason top-down. You can't just have a look at all the features you have engineered and then create some haphazard user-interface to expose them to the user and along the way pass along any error message that comes from any random subsystem directly to the user. There is no abstraction as leaky as a user-interface, I think that bothers engineers more than they are willing to admit.

"engineers have to work in a highly disciplined, tyranical kind of an environment"

That is not enough though, you also need someone who has the top-down perspective and product vision. Apple probably lacks both of these conditions right now, the usability of my iPhone is deteriorating so fast that I might as well switch to Android.

Re: Software in 2014

#45

Post by xd »

dmak wrote: post #37
xd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone that works on Go at Google I'm shocked by your very much subjective view of PHP. Elitist much?

That comment didn't even come across as elitist. There was no need to get personal.

He works on Go at Google. A skilled professional no doubt, could he not have made some valid points rather than simply calling PHP disgusting. It didn't add anything to the conversation.

If you where in the pub and someone spent some time listing the virtues of the pint they where drinking, and then someone joined in the conversation and called it disgusting with no basis .. wouldn't you find that to be odd behavior?

Re: Software in 2014

#46

Post by andyjohnson0 »

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…

>Unit testing is a bitch.

Haven't found it such. Except if he means with all the Android flavors? That's orthogonal and inherent to mobile.

I assume he means that the tooling isn't as mature as that available for non-mobile, which I think is a fair comment. Running tests in the device or emulator is more involved, as is mocking apis for things like geolocation or the camera.

Re: Software in 2014

#47

Post by andyjohnson0 »

kranner wrote: post #40
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…

> there are iOS bindings for all popular languages (and I've used several) Care to list some, other than Xamarin and RubyMotion?

There are iOS bindings for F# [1] with some level of support from Xamarin [2]. I'm not aware of any others.

There are Cocoa bindings for a number of languages [3], but I'm fairly certain they are desktop-only.

[1] http://fsharp.org/use/ios/

[2] https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/3465/f-language-bindin...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_(API)#Other_bindings

Re: Software in 2014

#48

Post by grey-area »

xd wrote: post #45
dmak wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comment didn't even come across as elitist. There was no need to get personal.

He works on Go at Google. A skilled professional no doubt, could he not have made some valid points rather than simply calling PHP disgusting. It didn't add anything to the conversation. If you where in the pub and someone spent some time listing the virtues of the pint they where drinking, and then someone joined in the conversation and called it disgusting with no basis .. wouldn't you find that to be odd behavior?

He probably didn't elaborate because he felt the basis for the view was clear - there are clearly areas of PHP which still need work. PHP is often frowned upon because the APIs are a mess of legacy cruft like addslashes, magic_quotes, mysql_escape_string, mysql_real_escape_string, mysqli_real_escape_string versus prepared statements. Efforts are being made to clean it up, but for a language to ever end up in a place with that sort of library functions is a pretty big red flag.

Re: Software in 2014

#49

Post by stiff »

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…

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

-- Rasmus Lerdorf

Re: Software in 2014

#50

Post by zxcdw »

xd wrote: post #45
dmak wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comment didn't even come across as elitist. There was no need to get personal.

He works on Go at Google. A skilled professional no doubt, could he not have made some valid points rather than simply calling PHP disgusting. It didn't add anything to the conversation. If you where in the pub and someone spent some time listing the virtues of the pint they where drinking, and then someone joined in the conversation and called it disgusting with no basis .. wouldn't you find that to be odd behavior?

He did explain why PHP is disgusting mess.

And hell, the fact that people have that opinion stems from somewhere. And that is a fact we should all take a note of -- to build better tools. You see, PHP is nothing but a tool, and as a tool, it's not very liked one due to it's flaws. Solution? Abandon it! Build new, better tools instead of feeling threathened.

Le PHP sink and die it's well deserved death and make way for better tools, because professionals shouldn't feel attached to their tools, instead they should be critical towards them and look to find better ones.

Post reply on HN