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I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

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Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#261

Post by petabytes »

zigzag312 wrote: post #5

Dart is my biggest issue with Flutter. It's still missing ergonomic features like data classes and lower level things like unsigned 64-bit integers. There is no runtime reflection, which I think is a good thing for end user apps, but it's also missing static metaprogramming. And code generation is not integrated into a complier. Since, there is no runtime reflection, metaprogramming & integrated code-gen are sorely n…

I really wish somehow Flutter or react native would be written in Rust or some other language on the same level. I hate having to deal with JavaScript or some half baked compiler.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#262

Post by saurik »

pjmlp wrote: post #226
doix wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it really depends on what your definition of "productive" is. Let me try and quantify it. I looked through my apps that I installed from F-Droid, then looked at their GitHub issues and picked one [0]. I bet I could implement that in less than a week with 0 Android development experience. > Every Android version is basically a reboot in many parts of the framework, the device fragmentation is hardly any better…

Already with that response you have proved not to understand the Android ecosystem. No it doesn't have an amazing backwards compatibility, specially depending on what is cool in one Google IO, and already legacy in the new one, without replacement, like e.g. Tango, Sceneform, Fragments. There are policy rules how old an Android app is allowed to be in Play Store.

I don't care what platform you are targeting: unless the entire purpose of your product is to take advantage of the feature (which is sometimes fair), you never ever ever EVER integrate whatever is "cool" from the latest keynote.

Regardless, while Android requires you to compile new apps with the latest toolchains to release, and you might have to update some stuff in your manifest, they do not force you to use new APIs, they do not require you to stop supporting old versions of Android, and I've seldom run into a backwards compatibility issue that wasn't some corner case involving the weird intents we have to use (as our app relies on being a VPN).

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#263

Post by saurik »

skybrian wrote: post #94
sgt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may lack things - true. But it's a pleasure to work in. I code quite a bit of Dart these days and the language never really holds you back. It flows quite easily. I use some code generation by having a build runner in the background.

I'm wondering how you deal with the pile of constructor calls needed to construct views in Flutter? Deeply nested expressions remind me of Lisp. JSX is conceptually the same but somehow seems easier to read. Maybe it's the close tags?

> Deeply nested expressions remind me of Lisp.

Is this supposed to be a bad thing? :(

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#264

Post by kazinator »

skybrian wrote: post #94
sgt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may lack things - true. But it's a pleasure to work in. I code quite a bit of Dart these days and the language never really holds you back. It flows quite easily. I use some code generation by having a build runner in the background.

I'm wondering how you deal with the pile of constructor calls needed to construct views in Flutter? Deeply nested expressions remind me of Lisp. JSX is conceptually the same but somehow seems easier to read. Maybe it's the close tags?

In Lisp, if you had piles of related constructors, you'd make a macro for that that would look like a declarative description of the view.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#265

Post by kazinator »

pzo wrote: post #130
skybrian wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering how you deal with the pile of constructor calls needed to construct views in Flutter? Deeply nested expressions remind me of Lisp. JSX is conceptually the same but somehow seems easier to read. Maybe it's the close tags?

I'm wondering about this as well, actually this weekend been doing Flutter 'Test Drive' of their tutorial and experience was not that great. I'm still forcing my brain to parse this complex structure with very simple widget structure from their samples. Its Flutter: ``` class MyHomePage extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { var appState = context.watch (); var pair = appState.curren…

I don't program in anything resembling any of this stuff.

The Flutter looks the best to me, out of those, hands down.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#266

Post by boruto »

dcchambers wrote: post #180

Why are people so obsessed with hyper specializing in software development? Labeling yourself a react dev or rails dev or flutter dev or whatever is only going to limit your growth and options. Your career will outlive many tech stacks. Tech changes quickly. Never stop learning.

I did mostly work on python and Java. Whenever I apply for positions using golang they stop my application process after learning I don't have work experience in the language.

May be this doesn't happen in FAANGS but I see it is the usual thing around.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#267

Post by gettodachoppa »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #162

It mistake misses the point of the investment. The pay-off is experience in new patterns, new tooling, new approaches. The dividend is in the job where you use the tool but the capital gain is in experience. When I hire for my team, I never mention the stack. I don't care. I am hiring software engineers, and what I value is mindset and ability. I'll throw you in at the deep end. Learn the language, libs, tooling, inf…

That sounds crazy to me. If you throw me at a new language, sure learning the language might only take a couple of weeks (if it doesn't radically depart from what I already know), but learning the libraries/ecosystem is at least 6 months. Probably more for something yuge like Java or .NET.

I'll be referencing the doc and tinkering every little thing for many many months, which is sure to affect my productivity. Append to a file? Make an HTTP connection? Serialize a data structure? Have to look it up.

Then come all the 3rd party libraries a seasoned developer will already know. How do I talk to Postgres? Which of these five 3rd party libraries should I use? Which library do I need to help generate my SQL statements?

It's like you're looking for a journalist for an American newspaper, and you decide "oh, you don't have to speak english, you can learn that later". Sure, you can do this for an exceptional talent, but on average you're better off finding people who already speak english.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#268

Post by kamaal »

scarface_74 wrote: post #32
tkiolp4 wrote: post #15

I don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology. It works for mobile development, for frontend, for backend, for infra, for almost anything. I have worked for years with PHP, Apache, Ansible and MySQL. Nowadays not anymore. And in 7 years I’ll be using something…

Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”. Better yet, since I did Windows CE development for ruggedized devices using C# Compact framework back between 2007-2010, I should have no problem picking up iOS development “in a few days” and start being a productive member of a team right? Or better yet…

>>Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”.

You can become whatever you want to become. Hiring is a totally different thing altogether.

Did A for B years is how you get hired. Not what you can do.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#269

Post by johnnyanmac »

scarface_74 wrote: post #170
convolvatron wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its fundamentally wrong to treat your employees learning process as a long term investment that you maintain ownership of. paying someone for two months to come up to speed is an investment. if they become productive in your environment, that investment is very quickly paid off. if they don't, then your at-risk investment didn't pay off. the return is the work that you got from them afterwards. you don't get to claim…

They didn’t though if I hired someone with no experience. They gave me six months of negative work as they took time away from the more experienced developers, did a year and a half of resume driven development (if they are smart) and then moved on. If I hired someone with the experience I was looking for, then they gave me 2 years of productive work. Why would I train someone new instead of just poaching your develo…

>Why would I train someone new instead of just poaching your developer at market rates?

Because you pay more, and still have the risk of less/negative productivity anyway? Who says experienced dev won't do 2 years of resume driven development instead? Who says they won't simply zone out and spend their last 6 months being poached the same way you poached them from the last company?

your argument works under the assumption that your experienced hire has no downsides, and there's no risk of upside for the less experienced hire.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#270

Post by johnnyanmac »

listenallyall wrote: post #211
moron4hire wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not been my experience with hiring. My experience has been that 9 out of 10 resumes that cross my desk have almost no relevant job experience at all . I'd love to have someone apply to a .NET desktop app position with 5 years of solid experience building Java web services. I'd love to fill a Node.js web service position with at least someone who spent 10 years writing embedded C for home automation devices. He…

> My experience has been that 9 out of 10 resumes that cross my desk have almost no relevant job experience at all. We're all out here shedding a tear for you. Not too sure what you expect, as they say, the real talent doesn't need to apply to job postings and submit resumes blindly. With that said, is there anything in your .NET desktop job posting that would encourage a Java web service developer to apply? The firs…

>the real talent doesn't need to apply to job postings and submit resumes blindly.

I think there's a huge valley of difference between "no relevant job experience" and "real talent". I do a mix of job postings to stuff that looks interesting while also talking to my network.

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