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Is the madness ever going to end?

unixsheikh.com

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#41

Post by a_e_k »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #21
tlackemann wrote: post #3

This is why I get paid top dollar as a consultant ;) When a company's top engineers decide to rewrite their stack in JavaScript, I get to swoop in, take $10k and tell them their old PHP monolith was just fine. Long live idiots, for I'll always get paid

It's amazing how (much of) 'senior management' is actually just stopping / not letting people doing dumb things. Turns out it's pretty much a full-time job just stopping silly things and keeping entropy at bay.

s/senior management/parenting/

It's striking just how much this comment also describes how I feel as a parent sometimes.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#42

Post by bdavis__ »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #9

Will random tech people with blogs ever going to stop submitting clickbait-titled blog posts? The actual subject of the rant: > Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry?

up next, chapter 2, about the docker infrastructure.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#43

Post by Trasmatta »

jcoletti wrote: post #30

"They constantly crash..." Putting aside the downsides and reasons not to use Electron, this statement is just false. They are not "constantly crashing." I currently use at least Figma, Insomnia, Slack, Spotify, and VS Code and these apps rarely crash, if ever.

The memory arguments are valid, but I don't think I've ever once had an Electron application crash on me. Contrasted with older native applications that would crash on a weekly basis.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#44

Post by dave333 »

Interesting that the Unix command line is still just as functional and useful as it was 40 years ago and yet the UI frameworks have been thrown away and replaced every 2 or 3 years. My personal experience with UI has been Openwindows, X/Motif, Java, HTML/CSS, pLain old Javascript, ExtJS, jQuery, Dojo, Angular - various incompatible versions, and React. Glad I finally got to retire!

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#45

Post by windows2020 »

bsenftner wrote: post #19

I believe we, as an industry, are driving towards frameworks that can be operated with story-like analogies describing what needs to be done with no technology knowledge at all. The core computer scientists creating such a framework create it with entry level non-developers as the "end-users" in mind. Such a framework is the holy grail of software development because it will enable any Joe with any software idea to h…

This works great in many scenarios. But when the time comes to complete a task that the lossy abstraction that is the framework doesn't facilitate, Joe hits a wall very fast. He then needs to either unravel the abstraction, find another one or say it can't be done.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#47

Post by com2kid »

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. 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.

2022, your sales team needs to access inventory levels in a database. Assuming you haven't already been sold some multi-million dollar solution to do this (and you likely have, multiple times, and at least some of the implementations have failed), you now have the following requirements:

1. Some of your employees use Apple laptops, some use Windows.

2. People want to be able to access the data on their phones as well, which adds another 2 OSes to the mix.

3. Restricting the app to being onsite in the office doesn't cut it.

So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website.

Now, native apps on smart phones are a constant maintenance headache. Major OS releases break things on mobile all the time, and entire APIs get deprecated. (Another reason why writing against Windows is good, that Winforms app from 2004 probably runs just fine with 0 changes in 2022) It is easier to maintain 1 website than 2 mobile apps and 2 desktop apps.

So, website it is.

What framework are you going to use? Whatever one is stable, easy to hire for, and has the best tooling. OK so I wouldn't call React "stable", hopefully it has undergone its last major redesign for awhile (LOL), but there is tons of tooling for it. Of course the docs suck compared to what Microsoft had in 2004, because it turns out part of that $500 per seat license for Visual Studio went towards amazing documentation and example code. And because Web you'll get breaking changes now and then, but it still is easier than maintaining 4 native apps.

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.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#48

Post by caymanjim »

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 technology choices to those from the 90s, and produce a perfectly functional, modern web application indistinguishable from anything using the latest tools and frameworks. It's a whole lot of work, though.

If you take the time to learn some of the modern tools, they'll save you a lot of time. Why re-invent the wheel? But all these time-saving frameworks are complex, and learning all of them would take years, if you haven't been keeping up as they evolved. You can learn one or two of them quickly, though. You can specialize.

That's why we have DevOps teams, UI teams, API teams, database teams. That's a lot of people. But that's what it takes if you want a high-performance web application that can scale to support hundreds of millions of users, is responsive around the world, supports a variety of languages, can handle disruptions, complies with regulations, and on and on. Don't need those things? Then stick with PHP and HTML on a server you run yourself. This isn't the 90s anymore. There are a lot of people out there, and if you're building something worth using, it's a different ballgame.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#50

Post by quanticle »

jcoletti wrote: post #30

"They constantly crash..." Putting aside the downsides and reasons not to use Electron, this statement is just false. They are not "constantly crashing." I currently use at least Figma, Insomnia, Slack, Spotify, and VS Code and these apps rarely crash, if ever.

I agree that these apps rarely crash, in the strict sense of the word. I don't think I've ever seen Slack get into a state where it's misbehaved to the point where the broader operating system has seen fit to kill the process. However, I have seen Slack get into weird states (like not updating read/unread status of messages, waiting forever for content to load, not showing notifications, etc) where the only way to fix the application was to quit it and restart.

So no, Slack (and other Electron apps) don't crash. But maybe they should. A hard crash (and automatic restart) is often better than the slow creeping insanity that seems to afflict Electron apps when their internal state gets out of sync with itself.

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