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Software Disenchantment (2018)

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Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#411

Post by tsukurimashou »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #403
jiofih wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He hints at Electron in the end, but I think the real blame lies on React which has become standard in the past five years. Nobody has any fucking idea what’s going on in their react projects . I work with incredibly bright people and not a single one can explain accurately what happens when you press a button. On the way to solving UI consistency it actually made it impossible for anyone to reason about what’s happe…

React is super simple - I could implement same API from memory so I don't think it's the root of the problem. > Nobody Speak for yourself

never used React but my guess is, it is pretty simple to use, but most people using it don't know what happens behind the scenes

(which is not specific to React but more like an issue for any framework that tries to do everything)

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#412

Post by acvny »

Each and every point the author makes shows lack of understanding of some basic things. Comparing cpu resources with fuel consumption? Really? Or windows update taking 30 minutes... Remember premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#413

Post by engineeringwoke »

somatic wrote: post #337
mynegation wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is better? Jquery? It comes with its own can of worms and React designers had solid reasoning to migrate away from immediate DOM modification. In general UI is hard. Nice features like compositing, variable width fonts, reflow etc come with the underlying mechanisms that are pretty complicated and once something behaves different to the expectations it might be hard to understand why.

jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame. Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) c…

Write your own framework-like code with just jQuery and watch it turn into a pile of mush. React is many things, but it is absolutely better than jQuery or Backbone. People always mis-use new technology; that isn't React's fault.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#414

Post by vetinari »

vsl wrote: post #364
thanhhaimai wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. I'll prioritize the 0.005L per 100km car for sure. That means the car can be driven for all its expected lifetime (500k km) in a single tank of gas, fill…

Nitpicking: gas goes bad eventually and needs to be burned before that, the usually given timeframe is after ~6 months.

That's the ethanol-component of the gas (i.e. the E part of E5, E10), as it degrades.

If you had pure gasoline, you could store it for years (and in past, countries and armies did exactly that for their reserves).

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#415

Post by vadasambar »

panic wrote: post #394
surround wrote: post #361

From a Reddit comment: > While I do share the general sentiment, I do feel the need to point out that this exact page, a blog entry consisting mostly of just text, is also half the size of Windows 95 on my computer and includes 6MB of javascript, which is more code than there was in Linux 1.0. Linux at that point already contained drivers for various network interface controllers, hard drives, tape drives, disk drive…

Since this Reddit comment was made, the Twitter iframe responsible for the megabytes of JavaScript has been replaced by a tag. The only JavaScript left on the page is Google Analytics, which is way less than 6MB.

It fits in just under an MB instead of 6MB

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#416

Post by engineeringwoke »

enlyth wrote: post #395
somatic wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame. Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) c…

That's a problem with the npm ecosystem. React is just so, so much nicer to work with. It's easy to be dismissive if you've never had to develop UIs with jQuery and didn't experience yourself the transition to React which is a million times better in terms of developer experience. I feel like people that don't build UIs themselves think of them too much in a completely functional way as in "it's just buttons and form…

Old is better is just not true here. React is a dream. Synthetic eventing, batched updates, and DOM node re-use are so good. I rolled my own DOM renderer recently and remembered a lot of problems from the past that I would not like to re-visit.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#417

Post by skohan »

d23 wrote: post #276

Performance is one thing, but I'm really just struck by how often I run into things that are completely broken or barely working for extended periods of time. As I write this, I've been trying to get my Amazon seller account reactivated for more than a year, because their reactivation process is just... broken. Clicking any of the buttons, including the ones to contact customer support just take you back to the same…

Johnathan Blow did a really interesting talk about this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

His point is basically that there have been times in history where the people who were the creative force behind our technology die off without transferring that knowledge to someone else, and we're left running on inertia for a while before things really start to regress, and there are signs that we may be going through that kind of moment right now.

I can't verify these claims, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#418

Post by skohan »

_y4o5 wrote: post #372
d23 wrote: post #276

Performance is one thing, but I'm really just struck by how often I run into things that are completely broken or barely working for extended periods of time. As I write this, I've been trying to get my Amazon seller account reactivated for more than a year, because their reactivation process is just... broken. Clicking any of the buttons, including the ones to contact customer support just take you back to the same…

I have a feeling however that this is in fact not broken but working exactly as intended. Corporate dark pattern just to gently "discourage" problem customers from contacting them.

I feel like the entire implementation of AWS is designed to sell premium support. There is so much missing documentation, and so many arbitrary details you have to know to make it work in general that you almost have to have a way to ask for help in order to make it work.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#419

Post by vetinari »

q-base wrote: post #362
jlokier wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Even worse, try using an OS running in a VM for an extended period of time..." I actually do this for development and it works really well. Ubuntu Linux VM in VMware Fusion on a Macbook Pro with MacOS. Power consumption was found to be better than running Linux natively. (I'm guessing something about switching between the two GPUs, but who knows.) GPU acceleration works fine; the Linux desktop animations, window f…

What year MBP is this? I tried running Ubuntu on Virtual Box on my mid 2014 MBP with 16GB ram, but that was anything but smooth. I ended up dual booting my T460s instead. But perhaps the answer is VMware Fusion instead then.

The answer is I/O latency.

Having your VM stored inside a file on a slow filesystem is bad. Having a separate lvm volume (on linux)/zvols (with zfs)/partition/disk is much more performant.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#420

Post by SebastianFrelle »

How does this apply to programming languages? I've always heard that developers should just stick to the language in which they're most productive, but am I part of the problem if I pick Python over a more performant language like Rust or Go for all of my work (web apps, command-line tools, etc.)?
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