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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#191

Post by dragonwriter »

strictfp wrote: post #39
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great perspective, but are those peeps writing the unused frameworks just wasting their time to solve a question nobody has asked? Take the D language, it's basically a poor man's Java, with a shoddy garbage collector and aspirations at being C/C++... Is that the work of heroes or the misguided?

Sorry, but D is a good idea and much closer to golang in my book, plus a lot earlier. They just didn't have the funding.

> Sorry, but D is a good idea and much closer to golang in my book

Wait, are you saying GPs description of D doesn't fit Go at least as well?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#192

Post by bigbillheck »

> In the past IT people, whether we're talking about programmers or something else, where very clever people.

I've been in and around this industry for a long time and that's not exactly the way I remember it. (To clarify, of course there were clever people, but also a whole lot of otherwise).

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#193

Post by slg »

com2kid wrote: post #47
root_axis wrote: post #23

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple CRUD app so your employees can work with some structured data in a DB somewhere, let's say so sales can check inventory levels in an existing database. A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks.…

>A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks. It can only be used by people on desktops running Windows while they are at the office, but that is fine because that is the world of 2004.

...

>People underestimate how simple Windows everywhere made life for developers. Amazing documentation, stupid good tooling, and an obscenely stable platform to develop against. A major OS version came out what, once every 3 or 4 years? And unless you were writing drivers, that major OS version wasn't going to break anything.

I was doing this exact work during this time and things weren't that easy back then either. Does anyone remember DLL Hell[1]? Even if everyone was running Windows on an corporate machine, it was still more difficult to deploy new code than it is today. Being able to deploy the same code to a wide variety of different machines is a huge cost saver today.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#194

Post by bmeski »

bmeski wrote: post #169
clusterfish wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if E…

Quoted post unavailable.

The romans forgot how to create concrete.

This mindset is why

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#195

Post by dylan604 »

prions wrote: post #18

It will end when people like the author drop their victim mentality and start putting their own ideas into practice. It seems that this person is content with yelling on the sidelines about how good and efficient things used to be. Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why? "The situation is really bad for…

>Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why?

Would it have anything to do with coding boot camps teaching people how to code specific to these frameworks vs deeper learning into broader coding?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#196

Post by barbarr »

distrill wrote: post #120

> In the past IT people ... where very clever people. People with a high level of intelligence ... I normally don't mind typos and would never comment on a misspelling like this. But I also cringe pretty hard at people lamenting over how dumb people around them are. The fact that this kind of rant is so full of typos is fairly appropriate.

The typos seem to indicate they were using dictation to type

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#197

Post by seanp2k2 »

petepete wrote: post #106
meetups323 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually they are websites. That's kinda the whole point... Spotify's desktop app is the same as open.spotify.com, Discord's is the same as discord.com, VS Code's is the same as vscode.dev, Slack is the same as.. something. But yeah, instead of those companies all needing 5 separate engineering teams (Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and you're joking if you think they'll make a Linux native app), they just make a web…

I think it's a huge pity that we're so reliant on platforms instead of protocols - there would be native Slack clients for every platform. Few companies even allow proper API access. Spotify buck the trend, Spot is a fantastic app https://github.com/xou816/spot

Crazy idea that I'm sure isn't an original thought: instead of adapting the languages to deal with abstracting the idiosyncrasies of each OS, change the OSes to expose a universal API to make everything else lighter.

I guess that's also kinda Docker or QEMU or V8, but also https://github.com/solo-io/unik if you think about it differently.

In other words: hey, Lisp Machines were an excellent idea back then, but they still are. Maybe someday we'll have a V8 co-processor. More fun reading: https://lobste.rs/s/2poahh/what_i_could_not_undiscover_about

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#198

Post by lmz »

bmeski wrote: post #169
clusterfish wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not (just) about money or profits. As a solo web dev, building for desktop with electron is faster. It saves me time, the most valuable resource. How I choose to spend that extra time - on more features or on vacation - is up to me. I don't want to spend it on learning yet another way (or several) to build UIs and apps, when I already know enough to make a good enough product for my goals. It would be great if E…

Quoted post unavailable.

...Or he could just go on vacation once he's done with the features he needs.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#199

Post by dragonwriter »

randomdata wrote: post #102
ramesh31 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why? Because in the time that OP spends tracking down segfaults and getting a dozen native libraries to compile for his native app, the JS dev has already finished XYZ feature. And because the environment is so high level, he can use the extra brain capacity for thing…

> HTML/CSS/JS is literally a 10x improvement in iteration speed versus native. When you need to release your application across multiple platforms? Yes. Not much else even begins to compare on that front. Compared to native development on a single platform? Not even close. HTML/CSS/JS development is painfully slow in comparison.

> Compared to native development on a single platform? Not even close. HTML/CSS/JS development is painfully slow in comparison.

I find it's often not, largely because the amount of focus on web apps means the native frameworks often are less productive by comparison than what is available for the web.

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