9 ms·

> You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing I'm 25 and I fee

by creshal 11y ago

> You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing I'm 25 and I feel to old for this industry already.

cubano 11y ago
Stick around for another 25 like I have...the fun is just starting!
- creshal 11y ago
  Fun as in yelling at people to get off my digital, hand-optimized assembly lawn?
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Written and read in hex code
- baldfat 11y ago
  I still get mad when people talk bad about Fortran and replacing the code with some slow solution. The power of CPU and cheap RAM has caused the world to favor the hand holding of developers.
pmelendez 11y ago
The only good thing (I think) of a generalist is that one is used to adapt, but yeah... it gets boring sometime. Although after a while, is interesting to see how we reinvent wheels and show them with a new fancy name, it is a pattern that you would see more or less each 10 years. Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's.
- creshal 11y ago
  > Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's. Reading up on the capabilities of early mainframes is eye-opening if you (like me) grew up on Pentiums.
  - SSLy 11y ago
    Could you recommended an overview?
  - castell 11y ago
    Yes, especially the MULTICS operating system was so advanced and dozens of decades ahead that we still borrow from its concepts. It had for example 16 security rings. Intel CPUs support only 4 CPU rings, and Windows e.g. uses only 2 rings (for kernel mode and user mode) (hypervisor mode uses another ring in recent iterations).
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - hga 11y ago
      Initial software based Multics had 64 rings, and as I recall only 8 in the hardware versions. No more than 4 were needed in practice: 0 for root, 1 for mail (e.g. you could delete mail you'd sent to other people from their mailboxes if they'd not read it yet), 4 for normal users, and 5 for some stuff that e.g. allowed anyone to use, but was restricted at touching anything deeper in the system. AMD dropped rings in their 64 bit architecture which Intel was forced to adopt, so they're becoming a historical curiosity.
      - creshal 11y ago
        > AMD dropped rings in their 64 bit architecture which Intel was forced to adopt, so they're becoming a historical curiosity. Not quite. Hypervisors are operating in Ring -1, SMM is equivalent to another ring above that, and I can't find anything about AMD64 dropping Ring 1/2? Ring 0/3 at least are still in use.
        hga 11y ago
        I submit that "supervisor/user" isn't an implementation of "rings", plural (and it's got to predate Multics by a lot, but I can't quickly prove that), and that SMM is something entirely different. Hypervisors and there use really aren't comparable to Multics Rings. A couple of minutes with Google only found hints that confirm my memory WRT to AMD64 and rings, and/or Intel not copying a segmentation feature added to later versions of AMD's chips.
- bigquestion 11y ago
  So this generation is rewriting everything that was made and working in the 90s. Was everything written in the 90s also a rehash of stuff from the 70s/80s? Just curious, what was the equivalent of HTML/CSS/JS in the 80s?
  - toyg 11y ago
    In a way, yes. If you look at OS interfaces from the '80s and compare them with modern ones, you'll see a lot of cpu power is now spent on eye-candy but functionally they're not terribly different. Except they're all built on C++, whereas before they were in C or lower-level languages. OO was the HTML/CSS/JS of the '90s.
    - bigquestion 11y ago
      Could all the large software applications of today have been created without OOP, just on functional programming paradigms? If OOP was beneficial 10 years on, maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML/CSS/JS will also be vital to future applications.
      - toyg 11y ago
        > maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML/CSS/JS will also be vital to future applications. There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely. Face it, "web technologies" are not winning because of any massive technological advancement, just like C++ wasn't this huge advancement over C. They just managed to achieve enough critical mass to make everything else look less popular. In the '90s, OOP did that through academia and commercial push (in what was a much smaller tech sector); html/css/js did it through the accidental monopoly that is the web browser. The end result is basically the same.
        ZenoArrow 11y ago
        > "There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely." Nothing with the reach of web technologies. The closest I can think of is Qt, but there are issues with deploying Qt apps on some platforms.
andresmanz 11y ago
Same here, I'm 26. The industry has changed a lot when people realized you could make a shitload of money with the web/scripting stuff. Coding schools, open source communities and huge companies love HTML and JavaScript and Python and Ruby for their simplicity. Just take a bunch of people, tell them they could make a lot of money by learning some dead simple languages and there you go. Doesn't matter if they write the most disastrous code in the whole universe. Look at Code Academy, for example. They add new programming languages and technologies every now and then, but basically it's always the same. Just like their audience. They won't add C to that list, because that wouldn't work for this average not-nerdy-enough-for-real-programming audience.
- peferron 11y ago
  Yes! JS, Python and Ruby are just "dead simple" "scripting" languages that only serve to "make a shitload of money" and aren't "real programming". Real programmers (like me) use C. Seriously, no. Just no. And if I wanted to prevent people from writing "the most disastrous code in the whole universe", teaching C instead of JS would be much, much lower in the list than teaching how to split code into modules/libraries, write testable code, etc.
  - hmokay 11y ago
    Well, at least when you program C the community is a lot better. Ruby and JS people can be truly cringey sometimes.
    - selimthegrim 11y ago
      What, they don't watch enough DS9 for your tastes?
  - vocatus_gate 11y ago
    Question coming from a long-time sysad whose experience is almost entirely batch and PowerShell, what does it mean to write "testable" code?
Kunix 11y ago
I am 29, started coding at 14, I've built UIs based on mIRC Scripting, VB/Winforms, C++/Qt, C#/WPF, Java/Android layouts. Using IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, Qt Creator and Android Studio. I must say: Atom Editor is great. Using HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop/mobile apps really makes sense to me, especially given that: - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Components/ES6/CSS3 features. - You can rely on native Node.js modules when needed. It's good for portability, HTML/CSS became better at UI, JS becomes a better language, current IDEs are great, live debugging tools are great.
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  The fact that you are being(edit: was) downvoted for constructive opinion shows unwarranted prejudice of HN hivemind towards web technologies. HN discussions on this topic are effectively useless, any constructive truth finding is drowned. edit: I'll take my downvotes with pleasure. The fact that I am able to use Atom or Nylas N1 or Nuclide on linux with 0 problems alone is enough to welcome proliferation of web tech on desktop.
  - grinich 11y ago
    Thanks for your support of N1. :) Feel free to ping me if you have feedback. I'm mg@nylas.com
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    Your decry of prejudice would be more believable if it weren't only unsorted generalizations (i.e. prejudices)
- scrollaway 11y ago
  You also forget: - There are far fewer native components, leaving accessibility down to the developer of the app and making it nonexistant. - Platform integration is impossible, which means there is no way for the framework, for example, to create widgets differently on OS X, Windows or Linux (these platforms have many different conventions) - Theming globally becomes impossible. If you want to write a dark theme for your desktop, you go from writing a theme once for GTK and once for Qt to once for each and every app you run. Uuuurgh. But only supporting one rendering engine, yay! Much better than the 6 different engines we have to support in Qt (huh?). And having access to all the latest JS additions! ... that were copied from other languages you could develop desktop apps in, because JS is a terrible hack. And relying on native Node.js modules, yay! As opposed to native modules for literally every other better language out there. I'm not sure what you're actually comparing this workflow to. Maybe one day writing HTML apps will be great, but today is not that day. Today, writing HTML apps is only beginning to be an idea that doesn't completely suck. But for the user, it does massively suck. Massive apps that ship their own copy of webkit/blink/whathaveyou, with security flaws that won't get patched, disgusting performance on low-end hardware, atrocious battery usage and decades of UX knowledge thrown out of the window just because the app developer doesn't have the knowledge to see it. I don't look forward to this. And I'm younger than you.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
What bothers me about being older is my first browser was Internet Explorer, then I got to play with MOSAIC's slow arse in school, then used Opera/Mozilla, and so on. Got to see where it came from. And the new stuff, especially Firefox, is coming full circle in how friggin' slow they run to serve the lowest common denominator of web pages. It's annoying. I miss Web 1.0. Add just a bit of dynamic functionality plus broadband and it would be fine for 80-90% of cases. And FAST! Instead, we get Web 2.0, 3.0 (4?) which makes pages on 40-50Mbps load like my old 28Kbps modem on AOL. Seriously...?
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > And the new stuff, especially Firefox, is coming full circle in how friggin' slow they run to serve the lowest common denominator of web pages. It should be easy to find performance numbers showing how Firefox 42 renders old, pre-CSS pages slower than, say, Netscape 4, then. Netscape 4 didn't have a JIT, didn't use hardware accelerated layers, trapped into kernel mode for GDI calls, didn't use accelerated SIMD for painting, and didn't have HTTP 2. It barely had any optimizations for dynamic restyling, so tons of stuff would get reflowed when it didn't have to. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Browsers have gotten more complex, but the complexity is often in the service of making things faster.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Notice my references to Web 1.0, 2.0, etc? That means my comment was talking about not just the browsers but the sites designed for them. The combination of the two have made web sites really slow that could be designed to load up instantly. Instead, they load up as slowly as some sites did on my old Pentium 2 running Opera, etc. You'd think they'd be significantly faster with all the Moore's law iterations and browser improvements. Modern sites make sure that doesn't happen, though. And I never mentioned Netscape: it was called Netscrape then and hackers despised it. I used Opera and IE mainly.
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      Opera and IE were no different in architecture.

by creshal 11y ago

> You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing I'm 25 and I feel to old for this industry already.

cubano 11y ago

Stick around for another 25 like I have...the fun is just starting!

creshal 11y ago
Fun as in yelling at people to get off my digital, hand-optimized assembly lawn?
- baldfat 11y ago
  Written and read in hex code
baldfat 11y ago
I still get mad when people talk bad about Fortran and replacing the code with some slow solution. The power of CPU and cheap RAM has caused the world to favor the hand holding of developers.

pmelendez 11y ago

The only good thing (I think) of a generalist is that one is used to adapt, but yeah... it gets boring sometime. Although after a while, is interesting to see how we reinvent wheels and show them with a new fancy name, it is a pattern that you would see more or less each 10 years. Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's.

creshal 11y ago
> Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's. Reading up on the capabilities of early mainframes is eye-opening if you (like me) grew up on Pentiums.
- SSLy 11y ago
  Could you recommended an overview?
- castell 11y ago
  Yes, especially the MULTICS operating system was so advanced and dozens of decades ahead that we still borrow from its concepts. It had for example 16 security rings. Intel CPUs support only 4 CPU rings, and Windows e.g. uses only 2 rings (for kernel mode and user mode) (hypervisor mode uses another ring in recent iterations).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - hga 11y ago
    Initial software based Multics had 64 rings, and as I recall only 8 in the hardware versions. No more than 4 were needed in practice: 0 for root, 1 for mail (e.g. you could delete mail you'd sent to other people from their mailboxes if they'd not read it yet), 4 for normal users, and 5 for some stuff that e.g. allowed anyone to use, but was restricted at touching anything deeper in the system. AMD dropped rings in their 64 bit architecture which Intel was forced to adopt, so they're becoming a historical curiosity.
    - creshal 11y ago
      > AMD dropped rings in their 64 bit architecture which Intel was forced to adopt, so they're becoming a historical curiosity. Not quite. Hypervisors are operating in Ring -1, SMM is equivalent to another ring above that, and I can't find anything about AMD64 dropping Ring 1/2? Ring 0/3 at least are still in use.
      - hga 11y ago
        I submit that "supervisor/user" isn't an implementation of "rings", plural (and it's got to predate Multics by a lot, but I can't quickly prove that), and that SMM is something entirely different. Hypervisors and there use really aren't comparable to Multics Rings. A couple of minutes with Google only found hints that confirm my memory WRT to AMD64 and rings, and/or Intel not copying a segmentation feature added to later versions of AMD's chips.
bigquestion 11y ago
So this generation is rewriting everything that was made and working in the 90s. Was everything written in the 90s also a rehash of stuff from the 70s/80s? Just curious, what was the equivalent of HTML/CSS/JS in the 80s?
- toyg 11y ago
  In a way, yes. If you look at OS interfaces from the '80s and compare them with modern ones, you'll see a lot of cpu power is now spent on eye-candy but functionally they're not terribly different. Except they're all built on C++, whereas before they were in C or lower-level languages. OO was the HTML/CSS/JS of the '90s.
  - bigquestion 11y ago
    Could all the large software applications of today have been created without OOP, just on functional programming paradigms? If OOP was beneficial 10 years on, maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML/CSS/JS will also be vital to future applications.
    - toyg 11y ago
      > maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML/CSS/JS will also be vital to future applications. There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely. Face it, "web technologies" are not winning because of any massive technological advancement, just like C++ wasn't this huge advancement over C. They just managed to achieve enough critical mass to make everything else look less popular. In the '90s, OOP did that through academia and commercial push (in what was a much smaller tech sector); html/css/js did it through the accidental monopoly that is the web browser. The end result is basically the same.
      - ZenoArrow 11y ago
        > "There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely." Nothing with the reach of web technologies. The closest I can think of is Qt, but there are issues with deploying Qt apps on some platforms.

andresmanz 11y ago

Same here, I'm 26. The industry has changed a lot when people realized you could make a shitload of money with the web/scripting stuff. Coding schools, open source communities and huge companies love HTML and JavaScript and Python and Ruby for their simplicity. Just take a bunch of people, tell them they could make a lot of money by learning some dead simple languages and there you go. Doesn't matter if they write the most disastrous code in the whole universe. Look at Code Academy, for example. They add new programming languages and technologies every now and then, but basically it's always the same. Just like their audience. They won't add C to that list, because that wouldn't work for this average not-nerdy-enough-for-real-programming audience.

peferron 11y ago
Yes! JS, Python and Ruby are just "dead simple" "scripting" languages that only serve to "make a shitload of money" and aren't "real programming". Real programmers (like me) use C. Seriously, no. Just no. And if I wanted to prevent people from writing "the most disastrous code in the whole universe", teaching C instead of JS would be much, much lower in the list than teaching how to split code into modules/libraries, write testable code, etc.
- hmokay 11y ago
  Well, at least when you program C the community is a lot better. Ruby and JS people can be truly cringey sometimes.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    What, they don't watch enough DS9 for your tastes?
- vocatus_gate 11y ago
  Question coming from a long-time sysad whose experience is almost entirely batch and PowerShell, what does it mean to write "testable" code?

Kunix 11y ago

I am 29, started coding at 14, I've built UIs based on mIRC Scripting, VB/Winforms, C++/Qt, C#/WPF, Java/Android layouts. Using IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, Qt Creator and Android Studio. I must say: Atom Editor is great. Using HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop/mobile apps really makes sense to me, especially given that: - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Components/ES6/CSS3 features. - You can rely on native Node.js modules when needed. It's good for portability, HTML/CSS became better at UI, JS becomes a better language, current IDEs are great, live debugging tools are great.

vdaniuk 11y ago
The fact that you are being(edit: was) downvoted for constructive opinion shows unwarranted prejudice of HN hivemind towards web technologies. HN discussions on this topic are effectively useless, any constructive truth finding is drowned. edit: I'll take my downvotes with pleasure. The fact that I am able to use Atom or Nylas N1 or Nuclide on linux with 0 problems alone is enough to welcome proliferation of web tech on desktop.
- grinich 11y ago
  Thanks for your support of N1. :) Feel free to ping me if you have feedback. I'm mg@nylas.com
- paulddraper 11y ago
  Your decry of prejudice would be more believable if it weren't only unsorted generalizations (i.e. prejudices)
scrollaway 11y ago
You also forget: - There are far fewer native components, leaving accessibility down to the developer of the app and making it nonexistant. - Platform integration is impossible, which means there is no way for the framework, for example, to create widgets differently on OS X, Windows or Linux (these platforms have many different conventions) - Theming globally becomes impossible. If you want to write a dark theme for your desktop, you go from writing a theme once for GTK and once for Qt to once for each and every app you run. Uuuurgh. But only supporting one rendering engine, yay! Much better than the 6 different engines we have to support in Qt (huh?). And having access to all the latest JS additions! ... that were copied from other languages you could develop desktop apps in, because JS is a terrible hack. And relying on native Node.js modules, yay! As opposed to native modules for literally every other better language out there. I'm not sure what you're actually comparing this workflow to. Maybe one day writing HTML apps will be great, but today is not that day. Today, writing HTML apps is only beginning to be an idea that doesn't completely suck. But for the user, it does massively suck. Massive apps that ship their own copy of webkit/blink/whathaveyou, with security flaws that won't get patched, disgusting performance on low-end hardware, atrocious battery usage and decades of UX knowledge thrown out of the window just because the app developer doesn't have the knowledge to see it. I don't look forward to this. And I'm younger than you.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

What bothers me about being older is my first browser was Internet Explorer, then I got to play with MOSAIC's slow arse in school, then used Opera/Mozilla, and so on. Got to see where it came from. And the new stuff, especially Firefox, is coming full circle in how friggin' slow they run to serve the lowest common denominator of web pages. It's annoying. I miss Web 1.0. Add just a bit of dynamic functionality plus broadband and it would be fine for 80-90% of cases. And FAST! Instead, we get Web 2.0, 3.0 (4?) which makes pages on 40-50Mbps load like my old 28Kbps modem on AOL. Seriously...?

pcwalton 11y ago
> And the new stuff, especially Firefox, is coming full circle in how friggin' slow they run to serve the lowest common denominator of web pages. It should be easy to find performance numbers showing how Firefox 42 renders old, pre-CSS pages slower than, say, Netscape 4, then. Netscape 4 didn't have a JIT, didn't use hardware accelerated layers, trapped into kernel mode for GDI calls, didn't use accelerated SIMD for painting, and didn't have HTTP 2. It barely had any optimizations for dynamic restyling, so tons of stuff would get reflowed when it didn't have to. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Browsers have gotten more complex, but the complexity is often in the service of making things faster.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Notice my references to Web 1.0, 2.0, etc? That means my comment was talking about not just the browsers but the sites designed for them. The combination of the two have made web sites really slow that could be designed to load up instantly. Instead, they load up as slowly as some sites did on my old Pentium 2 running Opera, etc. You'd think they'd be significantly faster with all the Moore's law iterations and browser improvements. Modern sites make sure that doesn't happen, though. And I never mentioned Netscape: it was called Netscrape then and hackers despised it. I used Opera and IE mainly.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    Opera and IE were no different in architecture.