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Get in zoomer, we're saving React

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Re: Get in zoomer, we're saving React

#131

Post by __s »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #65
mwcampbell wrote: post #44

> What's really frustrating about all this is how passive and helpless the current generation of web developers seem to be in all this. It's as if they've all been lulled into complacency by convenience. They seem afraid to carve out their own ambitious paths, and lack serious gusto for engineering. If there isn't a "friendly" bot spewing encouraging messages with plenty of emoji at every turn, they won't engage. > A…

I didn't read the article, but just based on the passages you have quoted and based on my recent experience, I will have to agree with the author. I recently learned that GitHub has a discussions page which is separate from the issues pages. To pass the time and to give back to the community I try to help people and answer their questions. It's a bit concerning to me that when I point some people to the right directi…

Back in the day these phenomena were also observed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

Re: Get in zoomer, we're saving React

#132

Post by nonethewiser »

kristopolous wrote: post #115
mwcampbell wrote: post #44

> What's really frustrating about all this is how passive and helpless the current generation of web developers seem to be in all this. It's as if they've all been lulled into complacency by convenience. They seem afraid to carve out their own ambitious paths, and lack serious gusto for engineering. If there isn't a "friendly" bot spewing encouraging messages with plenty of emoji at every turn, they won't engage. > A…

Things used to require much more competency. For instance, I've been looking at old Byte Magazine issues on archive.org Let's take November 1982. Here's an article on building a video digitizer ( https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n175/... ) complete with circuit diagrams, signal examples, and a control program in 6502 assembly. Hobbyist magazine. For enthusiasts. If I had a candidate that did thi…

Quite intentionally so. The more that its abstracted (well) the more accessible it is. Compare assembly to python.

With AI tools I think there will be a similar if not greater distance between python and something else.

Re: Get in zoomer, we're saving React

#133

Post by shadytrees »

skohan wrote: post #50
stasm wrote: post #46

> When you rename or move a file that you're editing, its window instantly reflects the new name and location. How does macOS achieve its reactivity? Is it two-way bindings? Events/messages? Immediate mode re-renders?

If I had to venture to guess based on how their APIs work, it's probably events. There's a system called "NotificationCenter" which can be observed to receive system events within Apple API's which is quite old.

Yes, there's the NSEvent ecosystem.

Cocoa also lets you two-way bind a state object with the view as long as the state object (whether it's a controller or a model or a view model) implements key-value coding; notably, the blessed data framework (Core Data) is KVC-compliant, so apps that use Core Data sort of get all this for free. Core Data also has fairly good support for undo/redo. That being said, Core Data is a fairly idiosyncratic relational data layer. It's sort of a double-edged sword: it's easy to do 90% of what you want, and the last 10% will involve some deep dives into Apple's documentation. But it's been a long time since I've written an app on OS X -- someone will have to correct my errors.

I've long thought that the inverse of what the OP suggests, bringing reactive UI programming techniques to Cocoa, would be much more interesting. Making native apps just as easy and as fun to build as web apps would be great! ReactiveCocoa/ReactiveSwift are promising, but the underlying, mutation-heavy Apple APIs still peek through. SwiftUI also seems promising, but still relatively immature to the, gosh, decades-old OS X platform.

Re: Get in zoomer, we're saving React

#135

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ricardobayes wrote: post #104
fifticon wrote: post #99

I agree with this guy. I can see that his tone unfortunately irks many to take offense and post. I am sad that microsoft has so dropped the ball on UI, that even MS' own teams use web tech to build apps nowadays. I particularly lament that scroll bars have become a lost art. We have gone from scroll bars working perfectly in windows 3.1, to .. whatever passes for a scrollbar these days. Often they are even hidden, so…

I thought windows had bad UX until I tried macOS. Maybe my taste is different than others but I found macOS UX to be really confusing. I particularly disliked the iconset. Interestingly this is not true for iOS and iPadOS, those are magnificent.

Did you ever try macOS (OS X) circa 2006–2014? It was really, really good and then they ruined it for the sake of having a (kind of) unified design language with iOS.

I'm typing this on OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

Re: Get in zoomer, we're saving React

#136

Post by andrepd »

fifticon wrote: post #99

I agree with this guy. I can see that his tone unfortunately irks many to take offense and post. I am sad that microsoft has so dropped the ball on UI, that even MS' own teams use web tech to build apps nowadays. I particularly lament that scroll bars have become a lost art. We have gone from scroll bars working perfectly in windows 3.1, to .. whatever passes for a scrollbar these days. Often they are even hidden, so…

> But it sure does look minimal and slick, until you have to actually use the thing.

Modern UI """design""" in a nutshell. So-called designers (1) optimise for "looking good on a screenshot / promo screen", rather than for usability and aesthetics for the user, and (2) do so according to their own subjective tastes, instead of evidence-based approaches. These are to me the two major sources of the atrocious design of much of modern software.

Re: Get in zoomer, we're saving React

#137

Post by skywhopper »

mwcampbell wrote: post #44

> What's really frustrating about all this is how passive and helpless the current generation of web developers seem to be in all this. It's as if they've all been lulled into complacency by convenience. They seem afraid to carve out their own ambitious paths, and lack serious gusto for engineering. If there isn't a "friendly" bot spewing encouraging messages with plenty of emoji at every turn, they won't engage. > A…

It’s because older generations inevitably devalue an evolving culture they can no longer comprehend as a defense mechanism to avoid admitting they can’t keep up. Anyone who seriously makes this argument that the Kids These Days are lazy/bad/worse than their own generation is either delusional or just lazy.

Re: Get in zoomer, we're saving React

#138

Post by LtWorf »

mort96 wrote: post #103
LtWorf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why can't we make an app if we need an app?

Sometimes, you want to be able to support more than one OS.

You mean like download qt and make an app that compiles on everything and integrates much better than a webpage while also being much faster and smaller?

Re: Get in zoomer, we're saving React

#140

Post by hantusk »

When reading through the comments here, I really feel like the article was misunderstood. My summary of the article is:

Point 1: React solved all the right things, but its current trajectory, does not prioritize developing the fundamental tooling we need. React does not allow us to build a new Figma (consistent undo/redo in collaborative settings, immediate low-latency mutation of app state to reflect user changes and building fundamentals to SaaS interoperability)

Point 2: People are overwhelmed by the work, and too timid to target the fundamental architecture we need to solve these things. We're just going with the flow.

He is leading https://usegpu.live/ to build the fundamentals right, an encourage people to either:

- help out there, if it fits your use case, or

- start working on targeting these fundamentals, where most needed for your own use cases, don't just go with the flow.

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