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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#261

Post by userbinator »

clusterfish wrote: post #161
ryandrake wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this isn't the first time in history that quality and performance got thrown under the bus for the sake of cost. When developer salaries are your highest cost, and you have to make more and more money, eventually everything will get (and has gotten) sacrificed at the altar of "developer cost". Historically, commercial software development has never been the place for perfectionist "software craftsmanship". If…

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…

You are saving your own time and resources, in exchange for those of every one of your users. That insanely selfish attitude is why we are so incensed by this crap --- especially when it's developers making the lives of other developers worse.

Have some respect for your users; they might be developers too.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#262

Post by Brybry »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #231
mjevans wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cross platform 'windowing toolkit' APIs are what's missing. At this point I'd be happy even if Microsoft, Apple, and UNIX likes (who would probably just implement any free open standard anyway) could agree on even ONE such interface. Postscript as a UI language? Fine as long as they all do it. HTML5+ as a UI language? (E.G. like the failed HP Fire or Firefox) Fine as long as they all do it. Some new thing that isn't…

That would be ideal, but there are huge differences between the window implementations on different platforms. One really obvious example (maybe no longer current - it's been a while since I spent any time on Windows) is that OS X windows are responsive even without focus. So you can scroll around background windows just by hovering without having to click first. Windows doesn't support this. The bigger problem is th…

Just an FYI your scrolling example is indeed no longer current (or least not with Windows 10).

Scrolling non-focused windows works just fine (ex. can type text into notepad while simultaneously scrolling a browser window).

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#263

Post by jabbany »

What I don't get about the rant is why it matters what the "modern" way is.

It's not like any of the old tools have disappeared right? If you don't like Electron/NW, nobody's stopping you from building native apps with Qt, GTK, or you can just draw your own UI raw! If you don't like frameworks with their own templating systems, maybe don't use them? I don't like them either! and yet rather than complain I just don't use them...

Abstractions by their nature make some use cases easier and others harder. They trade off efficiency for familiarity. If an abstraction is "popular" it just means many people appreciate its benefits over its limitations for their particular use case. Being opinionated is the whole point. If you don't like it or if it doesn't fit, don't use it.

Gatekeeping in general is bad. Dismissing a modern framework because it's "too high level" is rather silly. On the other hand, dismissing someone only because they're not using the "modern" stack (whatever that is) is equally silly.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#264

Post by bmeski »

beebmam wrote: post #254
bmeski wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a massive CMS and he’s correct. There is an insane groupthink going on in webdev. Another team in my org has spent a year reinventing our client side js so that our templates are now mixed with the svelte runtime. All to render/update cards on the page that can update when an api pings the page. So 6 months later they’re still building the svelte integration and have only shipped 2 pages to users. This is a…

I might find your argument more persuasive if you didn't use such extreme language.

If you think that is extreme language something is horribly wrong.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#265

Post by mbrodersen »

It would be really nice if software developers that rant about X instead come up with a better alternative to X. You don’t like Electron? Great! Come up with a better alternative that still gives you the multi-platform/cost advantages of Electron. You don’t like Node? Great! Show all of us what a better solution would be that still gives us all the advantages of Node. It is super easy, but also super lazy, to ignore the advantages of X and only focus on the disadvantages of X. There is a reason why X became popular! An alternative needs to give the same benefits while fixing the problems. If nobody can come up with a solution for that then perhaps X is a pretty good technology.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#266

Post by mbrodersen »

Subsentient wrote: post #229

The company I work for hired several incompetent devs who wrote an abortion of an Electron client. It very nearly killed the company. I finally convinced the boss to let me rewrite it in Qt, and now our feedback is far, far more positive on the UX. Qt and GTK+ are one of those things that work "well enough" on the big three, especially Qt (GTK+ has serious theming issues on macOS), and it's hard to justify Electron a…

Your argument seems to be that bad developers write bad software? Isn’t that true no matter the platform? I have written equally successful software in both Electron and Qt. In my experience, a competent developer can write great software given almost any platform.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#267

Post by dtgriscom »

userbinator wrote: post #261
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…

You are saving your own time and resources, in exchange for those of every one of your users . That insanely selfish attitude is why we are so incensed by this crap --- especially when it's developers making the lives of other developers worse. Have some respect for your users; they might be developers too.

You're presuming that these users would have a product, even if it took several times longer for the developers to build. That isn't always (or maybe even often) true.

There are tradeoffs to be made; being absolutist about it isn't helpful.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#268

Post by psion »

arilotter wrote: post #35

> The entry barrier to programming needs to [be] high! I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I think the author's view that frameworks like Electron offer "no value over a native desktop application what so ever - well, perhaps with the only exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse." is missing the point that a "2-year-old baby" making something shiny you…

I agree with the sentiment. I've been in a Magento and WordPress shop where I had to implement badly written plugins that my boss payed money for. I've seen people come out of code bootcamps calling themselves developers and all they can do is implement a design spec with HTML, SCSS, and jQuery. Yes, I taught myself a few programming languages,but I put in the work and effort to make my skills worth the time to an employer. We shouldn't lower the barrier only to call whomever can get past it with the low-level skills an expert in the field.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#269

Post by jd24 »

This rant reads like some old dude got left behind and is now yelling at the clouds; this is what gets on HN front page nowadays? It's clear he hasn't researched WHY these newer technologies and tools exist if he believes it is because we are just adding "unnecessary complexity."

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#270

Post by orev »

dexwiz wrote: post #63
caymanjim wrote: post #48

I'm a greybeard. I've been doing this since before HTML existed, and I've kept up with the changes as they occurred along the way. I'm not going to refute the author's points one by one. Everything being complained about exists for a reason. I agree that it's incredibly complex. It's overwhelming. That's why people specialize. An individual can still own an entire application and infrastructure, limit their technolog…

I agree with your argument. The comment about blogs taking long to load leads me to believe most of these complaints are really only applicable to small scale projects. The massive stacks used for web development now are targeted at organizations that can scale into the hundreds or thousands of web developers with varying skills. In turn, when doing small scale work, most newer developers copy the massive enterprise…

There are far more small projects in the world than ones that need to scale to be huge, while at the same time every developer working on a small project is trying to build their resume so they can one day work on one of those big ones. So that leads the every small project using these huge stacks for no technical reason, and bogging all those users down.
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