4 ms·

As a C++ developer completely ignorant of everything going on in webdev, except that 'something.js is always the new hotness', neither do I. I've basically ign

by nly 11y ago

As a C++ developer completely ignorant of everything going on in webdev, except that 'something.js is always the new hotness', neither do I. I've basically ignored the boom in the web ecosystem for 10 years and have even less interest in getting in to it than 10 years ago.

cgh 11y ago
Hear, hear. I wrote gui applications fifteen+ years ago in MFC and the ATL. Front-end programming was boring then and it's boring now. I can't believe people are wasting so much time re-figuring this stuff out.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > Front-end programming was boring then and it's boring now. Not if you care about performance (to name one tricky aspect). It's all too easy to write a slow app.
  - gcb0 11y ago
    no it's not. it's very hard to write a slow application if you know the minimum about how the browser/vm handles your data. very few cases excluded (e.g. scrolling issues on Android of old) it's nothing but a case of bad developers not having a clue. their code will be slow regardless of the framework because they use the wrong data structure, or render on the wrong step. simple as that. then changing framework means dropping several features until they are ported, which means less code, which means faster code... until all features are back in. then, rinse, apply framework du jour, repeat.
  - tomc1985 11y ago
    I second this. Performant code is not so opaque as to be super hard, people simply need to know their shit.
- danieldk 11y ago
  I am also not really into web development, but from the outside it seems especially primitive. I did write some Qt applications the last ~10-15 years and even at the turn of the century it was far easier: design graphically using Qt designer, run the UI file through uic, connect some signals to slots, done. All fast, smooth, with a much more native look & feel than web apps. I recently ported a larger Qt 4 application to Qt 5. It took one or two hours. (Qt 4 was introduced in 2005.)
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  It reaches much more people if that is what you care about.
prewett 11y ago
Also a C++ developer, I completely agree. If frameworks repeatedly have lifetimes of a year, that suggests to me that a) nobody really knows what they are doing, b) there is no way to do it well in JavaScript, or c) maybe the problem is that a document description language (HTML/DOM) is unsuited for the kinds of things we want to do on our websites. You can pick pretty much any of a number of UI toolkits for inspiration, they all look pretty much the same. It's not like UI is a completely unsolved problem. It's not even a partially unsolved problem. I'd be interested to know what the problem actually is, because I certainly don't want to have anything to do with the mess until someone comes up with something solid.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  I had the luck to ride the first .com wave in the 2000's, that is where I got my web skills. Then after almost 10 year being busy with server side coding and native UIs, got back to it in around 2009. Eventually got back to native UIs in 2013. Really happy to be back in native UI land. It is just plain chaotic the tools aren't up to the tooling level we had already in the 90's with RAD languages like VB, Delphi and C++ Builder. Using XAML + Blend, Android Layouts or iOS Storyboards is just plain nirvana compared with the chaos of making <div/> + CSS + JavaScript pretend they are native UI widgets in a portable way across multiple browsers. Also having to worry about the build tool of the day is just crazy (npm + bower + yeoman + whatever else is required).
madeofpalk 11y ago
I don't really understand the point of what you're saying. I ignore all of the .NET and C ecosystem and I have absolutely no interest in them for many reasons, but that's not saying much about anything. Just because you don't care about Javascript doesn't inherently make it's ecosystem so bad.

by nly 11y ago

cgh 11y ago

Hear, hear. I wrote gui applications fifteen+ years ago in MFC and the ATL. Front-end programming was boring then and it's boring now. I can't believe people are wasting so much time re-figuring this stuff out.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pcwalton 11y ago
> Front-end programming was boring then and it's boring now. Not if you care about performance (to name one tricky aspect). It's all too easy to write a slow app.
- gcb0 11y ago
  no it's not. it's very hard to write a slow application if you know the minimum about how the browser/vm handles your data. very few cases excluded (e.g. scrolling issues on Android of old) it's nothing but a case of bad developers not having a clue. their code will be slow regardless of the framework because they use the wrong data structure, or render on the wrong step. simple as that. then changing framework means dropping several features until they are ported, which means less code, which means faster code... until all features are back in. then, rinse, apply framework du jour, repeat.
- tomc1985 11y ago
  I second this. Performant code is not so opaque as to be super hard, people simply need to know their shit.
danieldk 11y ago
I am also not really into web development, but from the outside it seems especially primitive. I did write some Qt applications the last ~10-15 years and even at the turn of the century it was far easier: design graphically using Qt designer, run the UI file through uic, connect some signals to slots, done. All fast, smooth, with a much more native look & feel than web apps. I recently ported a larger Qt 4 application to Qt 5. It took one or two hours. (Qt 4 was introduced in 2005.)
dzhiurgis 11y ago
It reaches much more people if that is what you care about.

prewett 11y ago

Also a C++ developer, I completely agree. If frameworks repeatedly have lifetimes of a year, that suggests to me that a) nobody really knows what they are doing, b) there is no way to do it well in JavaScript, or c) maybe the problem is that a document description language (HTML/DOM) is unsuited for the kinds of things we want to do on our websites. You can pick pretty much any of a number of UI toolkits for inspiration, they all look pretty much the same. It's not like UI is a completely unsolved problem. It's not even a partially unsolved problem. I'd be interested to know what the problem actually is, because I certainly don't want to have anything to do with the mess until someone comes up with something solid.

pjmlp 11y ago
I had the luck to ride the first .com wave in the 2000's, that is where I got my web skills. Then after almost 10 year being busy with server side coding and native UIs, got back to it in around 2009. Eventually got back to native UIs in 2013. Really happy to be back in native UI land. It is just plain chaotic the tools aren't up to the tooling level we had already in the 90's with RAD languages like VB, Delphi and C++ Builder. Using XAML + Blend, Android Layouts or iOS Storyboards is just plain nirvana compared with the chaos of making <div/> + CSS + JavaScript pretend they are native UI widgets in a portable way across multiple browsers. Also having to worry about the build tool of the day is just crazy (npm + bower + yeoman + whatever else is required).

madeofpalk 11y ago

I don't really understand the point of what you're saying. I ignore all of the .NET and C ecosystem and I have absolutely no interest in them for many reasons, but that's not saying much about anything. Just because you don't care about Javascript doesn't inherently make it's ecosystem so bad.