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I mostly agree with you and I'd like to take the leap, but Javascript. I've tried to love it, and Typescript is a big improvement that I use happily. But in the

by m_fayer 10y ago

I mostly agree with you and I'd like to take the leap, but Javascript. I've tried to love it, and Typescript is a big improvement that I use happily. But in the end I'm just always going to be way more productive (especially in large projects) with a modern statically typed language with functional features. That is, C#, Kotlin, maybe F# or Scala. Really, you're right - for most consumer apps outside of games and graphics, the web stack is hard to beat. Between the devtools and inspectability of the view layer, the fast and interactive nature of development, and the sheer size of the community, there's nothing like it. So I really blame Apple/Google/Msft for neither updating their UI toolkits to keep pace with the web, nor shipping something Electron-like in combination with a CSS framework and nice bindings for Swift/Java/.NET that would allow for development on the respective platforms that really feels and performs native while leveraging web technology in the view layer. Both of those approaches would have worked, and neither was chosen - so now we have this bizarre situation with no good choices on the desktop. I have high hopes for WebAssembly, and if that fizzles I guess I'll have to make peace with using a language I don't like. At least if I ever want to develop for the desktop again.

mlsarecmg 10y ago
Exactly, i have no idea what happened, why all these frameworks were treated like that. XAML, Flex, and many others. Well Google tried to make a bridge with CEF (Chromium embedded framework) which had .net bindings but it was quite slow last time i tried. Not a real UI framework of course. I come from a .net/C++/C# background, too, and i disliked Javascript strongly back then when it was still a rumor that WPF would go down. But it's in a very different shape today and i mean the language itself, not just the community aspect of it. I write code in it that i would struggle with in C#. Javascript being very close to its JSON backbone and having special operators to mutate variations of it, i miss that in C#. Or dead simple async, caching, networking, it all feels very close to the core. Now where they implement atomics and shared buffers, there are very few things i would miss. The type system has also gotten better, especially with Facebooks Flow, which is very sound and can detect deeply nested cases.

by m_fayer 10y ago

mlsarecmg 10y ago

Exactly, i have no idea what happened, why all these frameworks were treated like that. XAML, Flex, and many others. Well Google tried to make a bridge with CEF (Chromium embedded framework) which had .net bindings but it was quite slow last time i tried. Not a real UI framework of course. I come from a .net/C++/C# background, too, and i disliked Javascript strongly back then when it was still a rumor that WPF would go down. But it's in a very different shape today and i mean the language itself, not just the community aspect of it. I write code in it that i would struggle with in C#. Javascript being very close to its JSON backbone and having special operators to mutate variations of it, i miss that in C#. Or dead simple async, caching, networking, it all feels very close to the core. Now where they implement atomics and shared buffers, there are very few things i would miss. The type system has also gotten better, especially with Facebooks Flow, which is very sound and can detect deeply nested cases.