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Software in 2014

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101–110 of 265 posts

Re: Software in 2014

#101

"JavaScript is horrible." > function byNum(a,b) {return +a>+b} undefined > [5, 10, 1].sort(byNum) [1, 5, 10] No, it's not.

Writing your own method to solve a problem every other language does out of the box is missing the point...

True, JS doesn't ship with a large standard library. But that has turned out to be one of its greatest strengths and a key reason for it's runaway success.

Re: Software in 2014

#102
post #62

I think this paints a rather meagre picture of software development in 2014: > More or less everything is expected to talk HTTP, and it’s really easy to make things talk HTTP. A lot of things that shouldn't talk HTTP are expected to just because there's an army of programmers who don't know better. Also, it's actually hard to make things talk HTTP, partly due to HTTP itself. However, much of this complexity is hidden…

oh my god, you're my new best friend. I was despairing of finding any opinion on HN that wasn't so mired in being too politically correct that it could have been written by a cold, dead fish with a robot brain powered by HAL. my extreme cynicism of HN comments has been temporarily rolled back.

> A lot of things that shouldn't talk HTTP are expected to just because there's an army of programmers who don't know better.

this worries me actually - there is such fantastic momentum with new developers and new tools pushing a very narrow set of technologies forward simply because they haven't had broad exposure (experience) to other ways of building yet that we'll arrive (or perhaps have arrived ...?) at a point in the future where we really begin to suffer from a sort of deficit in available sophisticated technologies because of a long heritage of using HTTP/HTML/JS/Webkit/MVC for frickin everything. Those teaching won't know any better and it will be up to those who have been taught to dive farther and farther back in time to when there was more diversity to find and appreciate different solutions. A little dystopian, perhaps, but justified. Cross pollination of disciplines and variety will save us.

Re: Software in 2014

#103
post #65
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

"haphazardly accumulated features" is not an explanation, it's a subjective point of view. "it's not very liked one due to it's flaws", PHP is very well liked, just not by everyone .. which goes for most things in life.

"haphazardly accumulated features" is not an explanation, it's a subjective point of view.

If you really need it, here's a very good write-up which should cover that in an impressively detailed manner:

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Re: Software in 2014

#104
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In what freezing fucking hell is a dual-core, 1 GHz computer with gigabytes of RAM and tens of gigabytes of storage and 3D acceleration that can fit in my pocket memory-starved and CPU-starved? Sounds to me like you've never developed seriously on an ARM chipset. These devices are worlds apart from your standard desktop, there is a reason that both Android and IOS dropped Adobe flash. It's partly the hardware and p…

> Sounds to me like you've never developed seriously on an ARM chipset. You're selling cucumbers to the gardener, I was actually one career choice away from designing chips, and wrote ARM assembly before there was anything such as a tablet. A mobile phone is slow in comparison to a desktop, but not slow enough to afford an excuse for lagging in most of today's mobile applications. If a Facebook client, a mail applica…

> If a Facebook client, a mail application, a simple 2D game or a music player lags on such a mobile phone, it does so because it's a piece of crap.

Fair point. It has more to do with the way these apps are cobbled together out of heterogeneous chunks of code, just to make them look "cool". The native frameworks are lacking in terms of their ability to easily customize the controls, so people start applying crazy hacks just to mimic some functionality seen in another app, without any regard for the performance. It just has to "work".

Re: Software in 2014

#105
I'll be looking at ClojureScript in 2014. To me, the web is great despite all the difficulties, just because you can push stuff immediately. If only we could have skipped all the mobile "apps" stuff, and they would just be links to offline pages implemented with JS, NaCL, WebGL, etc..

Re: Software in 2014

#107
post #71

"JavaScript is horrible." > function byNum(a,b) {return +a>+b} undefined > [5, 10, 1].sort(byNum) [1, 5, 10] No, it's not.

that looks pretty horrible if you ask me

It can (and should!) be written more elegantly

[5, 10, 1].sort(function(a, b) { return a - b })

Or, in ES6:

[5, 10, 1].sort((a, b) => { a - b })

That's starting to look pretty nice if you ask me.

Re: Software in 2014

#108
>Browsers suck too.

I think browsers are great from a user perspective. Everyone knows browsers, they are familiar with using them, navigating with them and all importantly making purchases. Coding with Javascript I agree can be like working with one hand tied behind your back, just because of its limitations, but you know what, loads of us can build apps with this and we can be guaranteed it will work on most devices! I imagine Dart may provide a better playing field for the developer in the future.

>Mobile sucks.

I tend to agree, although Xamarin and Titanium are trying to help.

>UX-quality bar on mobile is high and there is no fast or cheap way through; it requires inspiration and iteration.

I think Microsoft went a lonq way with Windows 8 "Metro" style design to basically tell developers, "build this way" then we should have great consistency with UX across mobile app landscapes

Re: Software in 2014

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you have to do your mobile development twice This is not wrong, in fact with Windows Phone and Firefox OS it'll soon become 3 x or 4 x, and more importantly compared to the web you have to make that choice of which to target, test and support - with web software it doesn't come up. The landscape for x-platform software is pretty limited, and having to use a framework like phonegap is far from ideal and…

> I do think it's a shame that the providers of these platforms lock them down to APIs in their chosen languages/frameworks I never understand this point. All APIs are exposed via some protocol. Whether it's javascript, C, Objective-C or HTTP. High-level APIs like HTML5 or Cocoa need to be exposed in a high-level language. The restrictions imposed by js or obj-c are an inescapable part of what make these environments…

It's an interesting debate, and in particular UI bindings often need higher level access. I'm not convinced that the trade off of being locked into whatever Apple decides is the one true language and API is worth the gains though.

I'd be much happier with mobile dev if the situation was more like that of developing for the web - use any language you want as long as it can output HTML to be presented in the browser. That has been a limiting, but at the same time truly revolutionary, feature of web software which freed it from domination by large software vendors and restrictive practices like those we've seen on iOS or (to a lesser extent) Android.

If all the platform vendors had standardised on an API in say c as web browsers or unix have, we'd have a much more convincing case for mobile taking over the world and competing with the web - given the current situation of competing ecosystems with draconian restrictions I suspect they will all be subsumed by the web at some point.

Re: Software in 2014

#110
post #49
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

I think this would apply to early Ruby On Rails. PHP libs and interpreter are actually fairly good.
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