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Writing an iOS app in Objective-C was the first time I remember thinking, "Goddamn, this is beautiful" since I was 12 and found Basic. One fucking language. L

Writing an iOS app in Objective-C was the first time I remember thinking, "Goddamn, this is beautiful" since I was 12 and found Basic. One fucking language. Looked the same on every device. And it wasn't hard to get a project going. We are making a fucking computer application, not boiling water for tea. Now everyone thinks it's progress and noteworthy and oh-my-fucking-gods-amazing to do this shit with fucking HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. What. The. Fuck. Can't Silicon Valley startups afford developers who can...you know...learn technology and write some code? Is SV only able to disrupt the world by leveraging a browser every damn step of the way? We are fucking modern-day wizards of techromancy who bend electrons to our will. We are the closest we've ever been to magic (since 1969). We come up with ideas. We make them something fleshy bags of water can poke at with their greasy, grubby, sausage-like fingers while they chortle and snort and spit their Cheetos on their screens. All by just futzing about with some incantations we spill out via keypresses. We can make just about anything that doesn't violate the laws of physics, and we keep defending HTML/CSS/JS as anything other than a horrible fucking wreck that steals our babies in the night, and thus our joy. Nothing about the browser stack is a conceptual framework that is closest to what we humans understand. That CSS has made slower progress in not being a shitshow than Python 3 is fucking abominable. That everyone is clamoring for JS to get all these proven-to-be-holy-rocket-ship-to-the-heavens features other languages have had for-fucking-ever, and had better, is just sad. What we seem to be creating is an entire decade of developers who can't seem to work without the browser stack. And that's a problem. Because we are going to be reaping the rewards of this for a long while. Browsers need to move beyond, developers need to move beyond. HTML is great when all you want is a motherfucking website.[1] CSS is fine if you're looking for a better/best motherfucking website.[2] JS was cool ... once upon a time. All three being the primary path taken for building every new thing just feels sad. [1]: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com [2]: https://bestmotherfucking.website https://bestmotherfucking.website [3]: While it's always good to use the best tool for the job, that shouldn't mean we stop creating better tools. Right now, the browser stack just seems content to keep adding more tools into the toolbox, instead of inventing the fucking cotton gin and automated harvester.

ThomPete 10y ago
You want everyone to be wizards but they are not. You want everyone to find value in only the most advanced forms of science but hey newsflash they are not. Most people are finding value in very very simple even simplistic things. Instead of being offended by that instead find solace in the fact that you can create things most other cannot.
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  I do not want everyone to be wizards. I want those who practice technology magecraft to stop rushing toward the bottom. I want to see less rationalization of lowest-common-denominator development as the best there is—or, at its most charitable, an improvement on good things that already exist, because this is often borne of an inherent laziness to learn, use, and improve great tools. I've seen way too much frank discussion among frontend web developers who are doing things with HTML/CSS/JS because it's all they know, and now they can do other things with it, not because using HTML/CSS/JS is technologically superior, easier, faster, more performant, better suited to the job, etc. It's because they can use what they know, and don't have to pick up a new skill. I find this to be worrisome, analogous to manual laborers being unwilling to learn new skills to remain competitive and employable. I am also not offended that people find value in simple things. To place myself in my own line of fire: There are languages I like, and others I don't. There are languages I use daily that I love and hate. I'd love to have a solid, cross-platform GUI toolkit in my language of choice. I want to be able to write applications by my own subjective measure of what I think is good for the job, how much I like the language, etc. I find it pretty sad that I can't just do that—say, write a truly native desktop app with Elixir, or Go, or Python, or what-have-you. But then I realize there are languages and tools that are already built for doing this. I just don't want to use/learn them. Or don't feel like I have the time. So, I'm just as guilty of wanting to use my pet technology of choice on all my problems. However, I recognize this, and I don't try to rationalize it as wanting to use a better paradigm or conceptual model. I just want to use the tools I want to use. Sadly, they don't always fit. I can't help but wonder what cool tools we'd have to practice our magecraft if all the time invested in bringing JS everywhere had been put elsewhere. Objective-C, to reuse that example, has plenty of warts. But it really outshines using the web stack to build native apps for desktop/mobile. Swift is even more pleasant in many ways. You use one language that's built for the job. You always think in that language. You don't have to create style sheets, use a DOM, or use JS bridges to things already made to do the job and do it well. Someone else already said in the thread that using a document model for applications is simply not the write paradigm. But we've grown so accustomed to shoehorning our ideas into a document model, we struggle to recognize this is flawed. Cross-platform and sans-browser development would be so much easier if there was a single GUI toolkit used on all OSes. Electron has grown so popular because people want to build desktop apps, and they want them to run on as many platforms as possible, while looking and functioning identically. But it brings problems, overhead, and other pains because you're building an application for desktops using the browser stack. Maybe one day we'll see this situation improve. Or maybe I'll give in like everyone else. Despite my ire, I am frequently impressed when someone creates yet another do-thing-in-JS tool ... and depressed. Lastly, I think you meant find solace, not solitude.

ThomPete 10y ago

You want everyone to be wizards but they are not. You want everyone to find value in only the most advanced forms of science but hey newsflash they are not. Most people are finding value in very very simple even simplistic things. Instead of being offended by that instead find solace in the fact that you can create things most other cannot.

bobwaycott 10y ago
I do not want everyone to be wizards. I want those who practice technology magecraft to stop rushing toward the bottom. I want to see less rationalization of lowest-common-denominator development as the best there is—or, at its most charitable, an improvement on good things that already exist, because this is often borne of an inherent laziness to learn, use, and improve great tools. I've seen way too much frank discussion among frontend web developers who are doing things with HTML/CSS/JS because it's all they know, and now they can do other things with it, not because using HTML/CSS/JS is technologically superior, easier, faster, more performant, better suited to the job, etc. It's because they can use what they know, and don't have to pick up a new skill. I find this to be worrisome, analogous to manual laborers being unwilling to learn new skills to remain competitive and employable. I am also not offended that people find value in simple things. To place myself in my own line of fire: There are languages I like, and others I don't. There are languages I use daily that I love and hate. I'd love to have a solid, cross-platform GUI toolkit in my language of choice. I want to be able to write applications by my own subjective measure of what I think is good for the job, how much I like the language, etc. I find it pretty sad that I can't just do that—say, write a truly native desktop app with Elixir, or Go, or Python, or what-have-you. But then I realize there are languages and tools that are already built for doing this. I just don't want to use/learn them. Or don't feel like I have the time. So, I'm just as guilty of wanting to use my pet technology of choice on all my problems. However, I recognize this, and I don't try to rationalize it as wanting to use a better paradigm or conceptual model. I just want to use the tools I want to use. Sadly, they don't always fit. I can't help but wonder what cool tools we'd have to practice our magecraft if all the time invested in bringing JS everywhere had been put elsewhere. Objective-C, to reuse that example, has plenty of warts. But it really outshines using the web stack to build native apps for desktop/mobile. Swift is even more pleasant in many ways. You use one language that's built for the job. You always think in that language. You don't have to create style sheets, use a DOM, or use JS bridges to things already made to do the job and do it well. Someone else already said in the thread that using a document model for applications is simply not the write paradigm. But we've grown so accustomed to shoehorning our ideas into a document model, we struggle to recognize this is flawed. Cross-platform and sans-browser development would be so much easier if there was a single GUI toolkit used on all OSes. Electron has grown so popular because people want to build desktop apps, and they want them to run on as many platforms as possible, while looking and functioning identically. But it brings problems, overhead, and other pains because you're building an application for desktops using the browser stack. Maybe one day we'll see this situation improve. Or maybe I'll give in like everyone else. Despite my ire, I am frequently impressed when someone creates yet another do-thing-in-JS tool ... and depressed. Lastly, I think you meant find solace, not solitude.