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"The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." No it isn't. Not even close. It's maybe the first cross-platform development "environment"

by timr 11y ago

"The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." No it isn't. Not even close. It's maybe the first cross-platform development "environment" of which millenials are widely aware. But it's only an "environment" in the most ecological sense -- it's a collection of ugly hacks, each building upon the other, with the sort of complexity and incomprehensibility and interdependency of organisms you'd expect to find in a dung heap. "Last but not least, the web's primitive is a simple page, which is far more useful than an app as a primitive" For whom, exactly? You're just begging the question. I'll grant you that "installing" an app is more burdensome for users than browsing to a web page, but the amount of developer time spent (badly) shoe-horning UI development problems (that we solved in the 90s) into the "page" metaphor is mind-boggling. In retrospect, the Java applet approach seems like a missed opportunity. The proper reaction to something like React, for example, should be shame, not pride. We've finally managed to kludge together something vaguely resembling the UI development platform we had in windows 3, but with less consistency, greater resource consumption, and at the expense of everything that made the web good in the first place. And for what reason? It's not as if these "pages" work as webpages anymore. A proper "application development environment" for the web would be something that discards the page model entirely, and replaces it with a set of open components that resembles what we've had for decades in the world of desktop application development.

cbd1984 11y ago
> But it's only an "environment" in the most ecological sense -- it's a collection of ugly hacks, each building upon the other, with the sort of complexity and incomprehensibility and interdependency of organisms you'd expect to find in a dung heap. That's what every practical environment is. Only the environments which never get used remain "pristine" in the architectural sense, because you cannot fundamentally re-architect an ecology once you have actual users beyond the development team and a few toy test loads.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Given how fast JS world jumps between frameworks I'm thinking that yes, a strong enough actor could in fact re-architect the Web, or at least clear out some of that dung heap...
dasil003 11y ago
> No it isn't. Not even close. It's maybe the first cross-platform development "environment" of which millenials are widely aware. Name one then instead of this patronizing BS.
- timr 11y ago
  Just off the top of my head: Delphi, Smalltalk, Java, Flash, Mono, and many different cross-library thunks like wxWindows, Qt, GTK+, and so on. Two seconds of googling will find you dozens.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    Those aren't cross-platform the way the web is cross-platform, they all depend primarily on one vendor's implementation. None of those ever had any hope of crossing the chasm to ubiquity, they only gained as much traction as their vendor had market clout on a limited set of platforms for a limited time period.
    - timr 11y ago
      "Those aren't cross-platform the way the web is cross-platform, they all depend primarily on one vendor's implementation" And web browsers are different how, exactly? (Other than the fact that "the web" is a mish-mash of hundreds of different "standards" with varying levels of mutual compatibility and standardization, of course.)
      - sethrin 11y ago
        Web browsers have standards they're supposed to meet. Where's the standard for qt? Where's the competing implementation? You can denigrate the web standards, even with some degree of truth, but you yourself have pointed out the difference. Perhaps instead of being dismissive you can elaborate how this difference is ultimately valueless despite its apparent success.
    - Skinney 11y ago
      Both the JVM and the CLR have multiple implementations. Both JVM and CLR have a standard, as do Java and C#. The primarily implementation for both is also open source. So no, they don't primarily depend on one vendor's implementation.
elviejo 11y ago
You are so right. The web as an application delivery platform sucks. And we are no even capable of producing UIs with the same level of polishment I did in visual basic 2.0 in 1996 or so. Alan Kay has expressed the same filling. PS to downvoters if you have not used a proper interface designer such a QT or Delphi, then you don't know what we mean. Please watch some videos to decide if the state of the art (angular and react) is what we should be using in 2016.
- dasil003 11y ago
  The downvotes are because he is not engaging with my point. Never did I say the web is a proper application development environment. My point was that you can't create a proper application development environment that is both an open and defacto standard the way the web is.
  - jt2190 11y ago
    > My point was that you can't create a proper application > development environment that is both an open and defacto > standard the way the web is. Why? Is there a technical limitation? Or are you saying that it's technically possible, but that you have no faith that vendors will cooperate and support such a thing?
    - dasil003 11y ago
      The latter.
  - timr 11y ago
    How am I not engaging with your point? In response to a comment pointing out how we need to re-think web application development, you said: "The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." ...and then talked a bit about how it's open (yeah, ok, sure), and then you said it's not really a good application development environment (obviously). I'm saying, your entire premise is wrong: it isn't an application development environment, any more than a box of legos is a "housing development environment". People have built houses out of legos, but that doesn't make "lego" a building material. It's a big, messy, nasty hack. The fact that it's "open" is a non-sequitur response to "it's the wrong tool for the job", which is what the OP (and I, and elviejo) are arguing. It's also not a legitimate response to argue that any re-thinking of the model has to come from a company, or otherwise not be "open". The reason that web apps happened is because web apps started as a hack. That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model. (Realistically, the reason I'm getting downvoted probably has more to do with my willingness to call out React as a pile of garbage than with the substance of the greater argument. C'est la vie...it's actually pretty amusing to watch the comment fluctuate between -3 and +3...)
rayiner 11y ago
The web makes Java look clean and elegant. Which is saying something. But it's an open question whether anything as popular as the web could have been any less crappy. CPU cycles and memory are way cheaper than social cooperation.
gjolund 11y ago
I had this discussion the other day with a junior engineer in regards to web assembly and the need for more stable compile targets than javascript. I think a big part of the problem is that web developers have forgotten (or never learned) about a lot of the ui innovation that has already been done for native platform development. I blame the page / html / dom model for this. It has forced generations of web developers to figure out clever (or not) workarounds to the point that they actually think they are innovating when they arrive at the point qt was at years ago.

by timr 11y ago

cbd1984 11y ago

> But it's only an "environment" in the most ecological sense -- it's a collection of ugly hacks, each building upon the other, with the sort of complexity and incomprehensibility and interdependency of organisms you'd expect to find in a dung heap. That's what every practical environment is. Only the environments which never get used remain "pristine" in the architectural sense, because you cannot fundamentally re-architect an ecology once you have actual users beyond the development team and a few toy test loads.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Given how fast JS world jumps between frameworks I'm thinking that yes, a strong enough actor could in fact re-architect the Web, or at least clear out some of that dung heap...

dasil003 11y ago

> No it isn't. Not even close. It's maybe the first cross-platform development "environment" of which millenials are widely aware. Name one then instead of this patronizing BS.

timr 11y ago
Just off the top of my head: Delphi, Smalltalk, Java, Flash, Mono, and many different cross-library thunks like wxWindows, Qt, GTK+, and so on. Two seconds of googling will find you dozens.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Those aren't cross-platform the way the web is cross-platform, they all depend primarily on one vendor's implementation. None of those ever had any hope of crossing the chasm to ubiquity, they only gained as much traction as their vendor had market clout on a limited set of platforms for a limited time period.
  - timr 11y ago
    "Those aren't cross-platform the way the web is cross-platform, they all depend primarily on one vendor's implementation" And web browsers are different how, exactly? (Other than the fact that "the web" is a mish-mash of hundreds of different "standards" with varying levels of mutual compatibility and standardization, of course.)
    - sethrin 11y ago
      Web browsers have standards they're supposed to meet. Where's the standard for qt? Where's the competing implementation? You can denigrate the web standards, even with some degree of truth, but you yourself have pointed out the difference. Perhaps instead of being dismissive you can elaborate how this difference is ultimately valueless despite its apparent success.
  - Skinney 11y ago
    Both the JVM and the CLR have multiple implementations. Both JVM and CLR have a standard, as do Java and C#. The primarily implementation for both is also open source. So no, they don't primarily depend on one vendor's implementation.

elviejo 11y ago

You are so right. The web as an application delivery platform sucks. And we are no even capable of producing UIs with the same level of polishment I did in visual basic 2.0 in 1996 or so. Alan Kay has expressed the same filling. PS to downvoters if you have not used a proper interface designer such a QT or Delphi, then you don't know what we mean. Please watch some videos to decide if the state of the art (angular and react) is what we should be using in 2016.

dasil003 11y ago
The downvotes are because he is not engaging with my point. Never did I say the web is a proper application development environment. My point was that you can't create a proper application development environment that is both an open and defacto standard the way the web is.
- jt2190 11y ago
  > My point was that you can't create a proper application > development environment that is both an open and defacto > standard the way the web is. Why? Is there a technical limitation? Or are you saying that it's technically possible, but that you have no faith that vendors will cooperate and support such a thing?
  - dasil003 11y ago
    The latter.
- timr 11y ago
  How am I not engaging with your point? In response to a comment pointing out how we need to re-think web application development, you said: "The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." ...and then talked a bit about how it's open (yeah, ok, sure), and then you said it's not really a good application development environment (obviously). I'm saying, your entire premise is wrong: it isn't an application development environment, any more than a box of legos is a "housing development environment". People have built houses out of legos, but that doesn't make "lego" a building material. It's a big, messy, nasty hack. The fact that it's "open" is a non-sequitur response to "it's the wrong tool for the job", which is what the OP (and I, and elviejo) are arguing. It's also not a legitimate response to argue that any re-thinking of the model has to come from a company, or otherwise not be "open". The reason that web apps happened is because web apps started as a hack. That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model. (Realistically, the reason I'm getting downvoted probably has more to do with my willingness to call out React as a pile of garbage than with the substance of the greater argument. C'est la vie...it's actually pretty amusing to watch the comment fluctuate between -3 and +3...)

rayiner 11y ago

The web makes Java look clean and elegant. Which is saying something. But it's an open question whether anything as popular as the web could have been any less crappy. CPU cycles and memory are way cheaper than social cooperation.

gjolund 11y ago

I had this discussion the other day with a junior engineer in regards to web assembly and the need for more stable compile targets than javascript. I think a big part of the problem is that web developers have forgotten (or never learned) about a lot of the ui innovation that has already been done for native platform development. I blame the page / html / dom model for this. It has forced generations of web developers to figure out clever (or not) workarounds to the point that they actually think they are innovating when they arrive at the point qt was at years ago.