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Stop pushing the web forward

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Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#251

Post by yellowapple »

codeshaman wrote: post #222
yellowapple wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Step 1. Pick a language. Since the focus seems to be on web backends (given the section following this one), I'd imagine that trying to use C or C++ for such a thing would not be one of the obvious choices. Also, you've listed Scala twice, I'm pretty sure Xhp and Hack count under PHP, and God help you if you opt to use ColdFusion or ASP.NET (or PHP, for that matter) in anything new. > Step 2. Pick a framework for t…

Nice write-up. I hope you do understand that the original message was a sarcastic joke. The point was - there's just so many technologies to consider and it's been just 15 years. When I got my first PC, my choice was: MS-DOS 3.3. QuickBasic, Pascal, C or Assembler for writing programs. There might have been other stuff, but I had no access to it. Ditto for documentation, tutorials or books. Things have definetely evo…

> I hope you do understand that the original message was a sarcastic joke.

I'm aware. I just like taking things needlessly seriously. It's a hobby of mine :)

> When I got my first PC, my choice was: MS-DOS 3.3. QuickBasic, Pascal, C or Assembler for writing programs.

Indeed, though those weren't the only choices even back then. Lots of different microcomputers, all with their unique dialects of BASIC, up until the late 80's and early 90's, when the diversity died off and IBM-compatibles became the norm.

Really, the current evolution in software is more just a resurrection of the diversity once strong in the realm of computers. Back then, one would actually have to make conscious choices about CPU architecture of all things; nowadays (for better or worse), we seem to be resigned to the idea of big machines being x86(-64) and little machines being ARM or maybe MIPS.

Not to say that languages weren't diverse back then, either. You still had Lisp and FORTRAN and COBOL and Forth and C and assembly and PL/I and ALGOL and Pascal and Logo (turtle power!). A little later there was C++ and Perl and Tcl to join them as some others faded out.

Basically, the evolution now is less about the quantity of platforms to develop for and more about the accessibility of those platforms. Pretty much all the good ones are open-source, available on the internet, and have plenty of online documentation. The free software and open source movements have been a boon to those seeking to get their foot in the door.

> unless something absolutely mind blowing comes up and replaces everything forever.

I suspect that "something" will either be artificially intelligent or pretty damn close to it. Development time and effort will decrease substantially if a programmer can just tell his artificially-intelligent software maker what the program needs to do - in a natural language - and the software-maker goes and makes a program. I suspect there will be a couple of stepping stones before that, including some existing stepping stones that we've already walked on. One of them is LLVM, providing a common core that any language can use with relatively-few obstacles. Another is the concept of programs that create other programs; languages like Ruby, Tcl, and Lisp facilitate this quite well, and it's probably a matter of time before those and similar languages are used to do things like automatically generate HTML/CSS/JS for web apps (as one example of potential usefulness in the short term). Natural language parsing by artificial electrical systems is getting better and better, too.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#252

Post by gull »

Shorel wrote: post #128
rtpg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but how would making browsers the operating system cause the incompatability problems to reappear? I think this is massively ignoring the realities: - there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment - There's a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers. Differences among current…

>there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment wxWidgets is native and it has been working for decades now. May be some people disagree with its use of macros, but it certainly works, runs fast and it's native in Windows, OSX and Linux. I repeat it again. It's not only native-feeling. It uses the native controls in each platform it supports. It is fully native.

I'm curious about this. Does something like wxWidgets offer all widgets that are available in an OS?

Does it offer the files listing widget the Mac has in that fourth mode, where flipping between files shows on top an extra area that feels like flipping between music CDs?

I guess the point is, what do you do with widgets available in one OS that aren't available in another? Should UI libraries keep up?

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#253

Post by yellowapple »

oldmanjay wrote: post #237
yellowapple wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's implying that Visual Studio isn't also bloated, overweight, and slow-as-shit - three traits which VS serves as the textbook definition of. It makes Emacs look like ed in comparison, yet without offering any actual improvement in functionality. In other words, "but it's on par with Visual Studio" does absolutely nothing to counter the argument that the JVM is unusable for end-user applications; if anything, it…

>It makes Emacs look like ed in comparison, yet without offering any actual improvement in functionality. Well, it does offer the functionality of being usable integrated environment, which I know a lot of the emacs/vi people dismiss, but it's a very real thing despite those dismissals. On the other hand, I don't really care much, since I've never had the emacs/vi user disease of insisting that everyone else acknowle…

> Well, it does offer the functionality of being usable integrated environment, which I know a lot of the emacs/vi people dismiss

Maybe the vi people do, but I'm not sure about the Emacs people, seeing as SLIME is the modern day free integrated environment for Common Lisp programming.

Regardless, my point was less about the superiority of Emacs and more that Emacs is the oft-cited textbook example of a "bloated" program (as per the "Emacs is an excellent operating system; too bad it's missing a good editor" joke), yet is dwarfed in size by the likes of VS and Eclipse while having parity or near-parity functionality-wise.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#254

Post by glandium »

huskyr wrote: post #192
aquilaFiera wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't categorize Google as the leader anymore. Mozilla and Microsoft have caught up and are as much leading the charge as Google is. Four years ago I would have agreed but four years ago we needed Google to push the browser forward.

The stats seem to disagree (1): Chrome has risen from a global usage share of 20% in 2011 to almost 50% today. Compare that to Firefox (2011: 28%, now: 16%) and IE (2011: 44%, now: 18%). (1): http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201106-201506

I'm pretty sure he's talking about W3C/WHATWG activity, not market share.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#255

Post by marcosdumay »

hodwik wrote: post #244
marcosdumay wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the only languages available are HTML, CSS and JavaScript... Eh, there is the canvas, and WebAsm. They make for a full blown VM if you don't mind shipping a several MB large interpreter with your page. Next step should be installing the interpreter on the browser, for everybody to use... Then we can create Flash all over again. (Now, if somebody gets a way to do that full VM thing in a way that is compatible wi…

>"Web ASM [...] installing the interpreter on the browser, for everybody to use... Then we can create Flash all over again." That's ridiculous. Is Javascript "like flash" because most browsers ship a several MB interpreter for it?

Javascript creating random elements on the canvas? Yep, just like flash.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#256

Post by rabbyte »

Native emulation has been a goal of the web from the beginning. I can recall several efforts as far back as '96 to create websites to replace desktop apps and we arguably achieved that around 2005 with apps like Google Maps or Writely. Two years before the iPhone was released we were chasing the tail of "native". The web vs native debate skips over the idea that these two worlds actually inform each other and are largely populated by the same developer community.

As an industry, I think people are starting to place more value on the comprehensibility of software over its capability and that's where I think PPK hits home here. When you're building to satisfy immediate needs it makes sense to eventually stop and revisit your implementation to make sure (1) those needs are still relevant and (2) your implementation adequately satisfies them. That's what I see this as, not a call to stop chasing native, but a call for replacing the patchwork with comprehensible design. I think that's perfectly reasonable and I would go so far as to say we should build it in as a cultural value to pause every 10 years to both celebrate what we've accomplished and refine the result.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#257

Post by est »

Anyone tried to use the HTML5 File API manually? It's a cluster fuck unlike any of good old javascript.

> Navigation Transitions

Seriously? It's like Frontpage 99 again.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#258

Post by shinamee »

bcheung wrote: post #239
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know PPK and his work? He's been at the cutting edge of web-standards and implementations for at least 12 years if my memory serves me correctly. >And you'll get exactly what you want. // If he wants to avoid the web being badly negatively effected by short term views of current browser companies and standards bodies then he won't get what he wants by sticking his head in the sand and ignoring the direction he…

> PPK is doing the equivalent of saying "let's stop and ask for directions [on our car journey]" and you're saying "no, let's just keep driving I'm sure we'll get to where we want to go". Just because one person is lost doesn't mean everyone else in the vehicle is. Those who know where they are going don't need to stop and ask for directions. Don't force them to.

You have a valid point, not everyone is lost but obviously everyone seems to be digging in the same ship just for the sake of it. If you try to understand more of what OP is trying to say, then you will know that there are more problems created than solution.

It's getting more difficult for beginners to catch up or even were to start from (see lots of those questions on Quora), perhaps we need to reexamine things rather than building 4million cars a day only to realize we have global warming.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#259

Post by comex »

Shorel wrote: post #128
rtpg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but how would making browsers the operating system cause the incompatability problems to reappear? I think this is massively ignoring the realities: - there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment - There's a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers. Differences among current…

>there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment wxWidgets is native and it has been working for decades now. May be some people disagree with its use of macros, but it certainly works, runs fast and it's native in Windows, OSX and Linux. I repeat it again. It's not only native-feeling. It uses the native controls in each platform it supports. It is fully native.

It is more native than toolkits which try to recreate the controls themselves. But I would not call it "fully native", because it does not let you write cross-platform fully native-feeling apps. It fails at that for the simple reason that that is impossible: different platforms have different UI conventions, including icon appearance, controls with no direct equivalents on other platforms, or with equivalents that have subtle differences in usage, idioms and standard layouts, behavior of keyboard shortcuts and gestures, use of platform-specific features, etc. If you do not spend a significant amount of time tuning your UI for each, you may end up with something that's 80% right, but it will never be 100% right.

Also, wxWidgets has had a lot of problems lately on OS X: high-DPI not being supported properly for years, broken focus, other bugs. It's not just the macros that make it an icky framework, which I say from unfortunate first-hand experience.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#260

Post by jay_kyburz »

robbrown451 wrote: post #42

"Native apps will always be much better at native than a browser. Instead, we should focus on the web’s strengths: simplicity, URLs and reach." For me, the web's main strength is that you have to write your application only once. I don't have to think about redesigning the UI because "that's not the iOS way" or "that's not the Android way." I don't have switch between different languages and write the same damn thing…

Also Security. Installing an app (even from an official store) is just too risky. Even a non-malicious app can significantly undermine your machines performance.

When I close a browser tab, the web app is gone!

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