Ask HN: Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore?

I have a number of years experience working with Tcl, and also a bit of Tk, which fits the bill nicely for that kind of thing.

However... yeah, doing client apps is not "where it's at" compared to web apps. I never thought I would say that. Web apps were, once upon a time, sort of ugly and boring compared to all the cool stuff you could do with 'real' apps. But with things like Rails, and the ability to easily deploy new versions, the world has changed, and web apps are "where it's at", in a lot of ways.

If you're interested in using Tcl and Tk, I could send out a few feelers to that community. Lots of them aren't really in the YC 'demographic' (older, families, etc...), but some of them are pretty sharp coders.

Heh- true 'nuff! If we could do what we do using only web software, we would. It seems that apps like Quicksilver (Mac), Enso (Windows), Firefox, etc., are still pretty darn innovative. But the agility that the web affords is pretty darn addictive.

I personally don't mind writing client software. I'm still in school, and I honestly don't have a huge amount of experience, but efficiency is really appealing to me. Web programming is fun when using Django or Rails. The code is beautiful, and it provides a great way to innovate. However, when I sit back and think about all the extra nonsense that is going on under the hood of a web app I start to get slightly frustrated. I'm not saying that I can fix this or even that it isn't the best way for the web to be built. It's just that there is something cool to me about building a brilliantly efficient client side app. I'm not going to say that I enjoy optimizing assembly, but there is definitely something satisfying to me about creating a really efficient and secure application.

I'm not planning on making a career out of client software, but I do enjoy it at times. I strongly prefer writing web apps, but I also hack away at OpenGL and C++ occasionally in my spare time.

I think within your post right here lies a lot of the problem. There needs to be a really compelling to write something as desktop software instead of as a web app, so most people don't even bother to learn how to write desktop software in the first place.

i've done both (although my client-based experience is now a little old-ish). i've worked on client-based stuff (c++ mostly) and done your standard web app dev work (rails, php, java, etc.).

the turning point for me, where i decided that i wanted to focus more on web dev type things, was in a UI and software engineering class i took in college. we had to build a c/c++ program to process and display some data graphically, with a nice gui interface.

learning about, creating, and working with a modest GUI was painful and time consuming, to say the least. everyone struggled, and what took my group (4ish people) weeks in c/c++ and MFC would've taken me hours with html/javascript. the productivity difference and learning curve totally turned me off of client-based app work.

having said all of that, i acknowledge that i didn't do work in .net or in a java framework, and i know that the situation is currently much better than it used to be. i'm not claiming that one is better than the other, just explaining why i turned my focus away from client-based apps. i'd love to return to them, just haven't had the need or time to do so.

also, full disclosure, i dropped rescuetime an email about employment a while ago :)