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Electron considered harmful

drewdevault.com

211–220 of 256 posts

Re: Electron considered harmful

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile my webserver that serves 8 websites (some static sites, some sophisticated web apps) sites at 80 MB used RAM. For everything. You can't make this up.

Your web server also doesn't run X11 or any window managers nor any gui apps.

That's true, but I don't see anything in that list that needs to use multiple hundreds of MB of RAM. To witness, we had GUI apps in 1995. They look a bit nicer these days, but not multiple-100-MB nicer. :)

Re: Electron considered harmful

#212
post #30
post #3

This had me for the first half, where the author walks you through the 'case study' applications that offer minimal functionality despite shipping with an entire browser inside. But then the essay turns into a rant. It's 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn't a real programming language. Phrasing the argument the way he does just betrays his smug elitism. The fact is, for many types of applications,…

> It's 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn't a real programming language. Phrasing the argument the way he does just betrays his smug elitism. Using the date as an argument is also poor form. JS is a terrible programming language (I'm not denying that it is a programming language though) regardless of how popular it is (although I think I might be going against the grain here on HN, many people her…

> JS is a terrible programming language

oh do us a favour, that's just YOUR opinion

Re: Electron considered harmful

#213
post #70

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JS is a terrible programming language I can never see the point of comments like these. Not one person who reads that will have his mind changed. HTML/CSS can be nice to have in such a situation, although a refusal to learn other GUI frameworks probably makes for a poor (native) developer. No it doesn't. Either the developer benefits or doesn't benefit from "refusing". There's only so much time in the day. I'll refus…

> I can never see the point of comments like these. Not one person who reads that will have his mind changed. I wasn't expecting to change anyone's mind with that. There are more robust programming languages that don't have the same inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies and encourages better practices in general (even though it is true than you can write terrible code in any language). > No it doesn't. Either the develo…

> Keeping the user in mind when making these decisions may make you consider more native and less resource-intensive alternatives

Usually the choice for the user is between "have an electron app in a month" and "have native app in a year", most users prefer to not wait, and when native app comes in a year, electron app will have much more polish, and run acceptably on new hardware.

The issue is not about 'protecting poor users'.

Most electron apps are quick experiments, to test out an idea without spending too much resources on it.

If idea is great, and performance is an issue, and there are enough users to get a team of highly skilled developers to work on it, they'll create native app, replace electron version (and then embed js vm to support plugins:).

Re: Electron considered harmful

#214
post #197

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I can't see how Cocoa failed at anything.

> I can't see how Cocoa failed at anything. Will my Cocoa app run on Windows, Linux and the web? (A well-designed web app built with Electron will). Why should any company that wants their product to be widely available invest in Cocoa developers?

Why should it? It focuses on its platform and does it well.

I prefer native Mac apps to cross-platform ones. Serious companies should build native apps and keep UX guidelines of each platform in mind.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#215
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn't a real programming language. Phrasing the argument the way he does just betrays his smug elitism. Using the date as an argument is also poor form. JS is a terrible programming language (I'm not denying that it is a programming language though) regardless of how popular it is (although I think I might be going against the grain here on HN, many people her…

> the developer is seemingly unwilling to consider more appropriate technologies outside of their comfort zone The very same can be said about people looking down on Electron. Most of them can't write decent native apps to begin with. I used all of win32, Qt, GTK, wx and Cocoa to name but a few. They all suck in one way or another. Suggesting people are poor native developers for refusing to learn these frameworks co…

> What if the only difference between the web and desktop apps are that the desktop app can open local files while the web app downloads them?

This was the exact problem I needed to solve that led to my first Electron app.

Needed to recursively crawl a directory and generate a report on all pdfs found and the total pages in each pdf.

It seemed silly to learn a new language and ui kit when I could glue together some wen technology over a weekend and make it happen.

http://designbymobi.us/how-i-built-my-first-desktop-app-in-3...

Re: Electron considered harmful

#216

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Hello again, qwerty'. Thanks for stepping up on the JS issue :-) There are many good languages out there, "when used as directed". Alas, out here in the flyover country of Sacramento, there is really only demand for 3 kinds of jobs: Java, C#.NET (falling off), and some Javascript, ignoring the long tail of one-of-a-kind shops. Given those choices, I'll take the Javascript. Java 8 lambdas are clumsy to use to assemble…

I couldn't agree more with this. Just the fact that functions are a first class type in JS already makes it better than many other languages. Another thing that JS is great at is the flexibility it provides: objects are very general and you can do almost anything with them. Anyone would care to explain why does JS take so much hate?

http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/22161...

The answer doesn't really end up being static vs dynamic, but rather how dynamic languages often lack the other facilities that make programming in the large easier, and Eric Lippert uses js as an example.

Companies with a lot of money at stake have spent a lot of money and effort on things that transpile to js. The people making these decisions are almost always quite smart and very practical. They don't care if first class functions are sexy. They just want to write high quality code quickly. If they've spent so much time wrapping it up, you know it's because they had serious issues being productive at scale with js. They, and people on their team, probably got extremely frustrated along the way. Hence the hate.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more with this. Just the fact that functions are a first class type in JS already makes it better than many other languages. Another thing that JS is great at is the flexibility it provides: objects are very general and you can do almost anything with them. Anyone would care to explain why does JS take so much hate?

http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/22161... The answer doesn't really end up being static vs dynamic, but rather how dynamic languages often lack the other facilities that make programming in the large easier, and Eric Lippert uses js as an example. Companies with a lot of money at stake have spent a lot of money and effort on things that transpile to js. The people making these decisions are almo…

Sooo... people don't like JS because 1) it's dynamically typed, and 2) they don't like JS?

>They don't care if first class functions are sexy.

It's not about being sexy (and believe me: first class functions aren't): it's about getting a very useful feature right, something many languages seem to have trouble with, despite the fact that Lisp (and ALGOL, IIRC) got it right in the 50s.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your web server also doesn't run X11 or any window managers nor any gui apps.

That's true, but I don't see anything in that list that needs to use multiple hundreds of MB of RAM. To witness, we had GUI apps in 1995. They look a bit nicer these days, but not multiple-100-MB nicer. :)

Emacs is far older than 1995 and still eating 250Mb :)

Re: Electron considered harmful

#219

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> For the average application going native will easily triple your development time and costs for absolutely no noticeable performance difference. Sublime text still smokes Atom and VSCode in the performance arena.

And they're all mediocre when compared to Vim/Emacs (and these are both inferior to Spacemacs which actually combines these two.) Why isn't everyone using Spacemacs then? Visual Studio is much, much slower than all of them yet its still an incredibly popular IDE for some reason. It has endless flaws, one of them being its still 32-bit and often crashes on larger projects. (The last game I ported to the PSVita would h…

People use Visual Studio instead of Vim or GNU Emacs because there's much more marketing and advertising being done for Visual Studio.

Re: Electron considered harmful

#220
post #185

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I also have, and would keep on using Java, Qt, wxWidgets than bothering with Electron, and I do have my share of web projects. Also for all the kids out there, Electron is the second coming of the MSHTML ActiveX engine. I didn't like it then, surely don't like it now.

>Electron is the second coming of the MSHTML ActiveX engine. Really? I've always thought of it as the "blinders-on dev's XULRunner".

Well, MSHTML is older. :)
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