7 ms·

I don't really see what the benefit of JavaScript app development is. You don't need to use electron and JavaScript for portability, as far as I'm aware. For ex

I don't really see what the benefit of JavaScript app development is. You don't need to use electron and JavaScript for portability, as far as I'm aware. For example, I know of Qt, and I'm sure there are other toolkits in other similarly mature platforms. This seems destined to go the way of emacs. This is always what happens when an idealistic perspective wins out over a practical one in a development team.

chickenfries 9y ago
It's a benefit if your engineers already know JavaScript, obviously. Also, emacs is one of the most successful text editors so I'm not sure I get your comparison.
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  I don't consider emacs successful. Succesful among fanatics, maybe, but I don't consider is valuable to a serious programmer. Also, surely it's not that hard to switch languages? In my experience all languages are essentially the same.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >In my experience all languages are essentially the same. That's the problem: you don't seem to have enough experience.
    - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
      I dont seem to have much experience? Based on what? For having a different view than you? Isnt that a little naive? So as far as actually talking about my point goes, what exactly am I missing? There are small differences but I've never seen a language that I couldn't get up and going in over the course of a week. How much experience do you think I have? I've used plenty of languages, and I'm well aware that there are nuances.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        >So as far as actually talking about my point goes, what exactly am I missing? There are small differences but I've never seen a language that I couldn't get up and going in over the course of a week. That's because you either used the languages superficially, or use only very similar languages, probably of the Algol family (e.g. Ruby, Python, PHP, JS, etc). You won't get very far with Haskell "over the course of a week". Or APL. Or Idris. Or Erlang. Or Lisp -- or any other language that's not a mere Algol derivative with some different bells and whistles. And even those have their idioms, of course, that one needs much more than a week to get competent with, but, it gets worse when we expand languages to not be "mainstream Algol derivatives". One would only be using languages like Smalltalk, OcamL, Scheme, Scala, Self, etc, superficially without getting into their idioms and nuance, which wont happen in a week (and can take years to really master).
        ruleabidinguser 9y ago
        Well of course you can't include languages like Haskell in the group of interchangeable languages. Incidentally I have used Haskell (and it did take more than a week). But it doesn't matter because we're talking about moving JavaScript developers to Java, or C++, or as you say, Algol-likes.
        coldtea 9y ago
        >Well of course you can't include languages like Haskell in the group of interchangeable languages. Well, if you can only include "interchangeable languages" then it's not an observation but a tautology.
        ruleabidinguser 9y ago
        No kidding? What I was trying to say (I thought I was pretty clear) is that we're really only considering institutional languages here. As it turns out to my knowledge theyre basically all the same.
      - tree_of_item 9y ago
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - computerex 9y ago
    Not useful to serious programmers? Do you feel the same way about Vim? Just because you haven't gotten used to using something, doesn't mean it's necessarily total shit. There is a reason why people have been using emacs for decades.
    - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
      I do actually, and I should reword that to "not useful for serious programming." VIM to me is best used for lightweight, quick and short editing tasks. THats how I use it. For any involved work, you're going to want a debugger, you're going to want automated build tools, you're going to want effortless compile/run cycles and so on.. You don't really want to implement all of that in VIM because your work won't be portable.
      - scott_s 9y ago
        I have all those. They're just not integrated into my editor. I use vim; it is my editor, but not my development environment. Unix is my development environment.
        ruleabidinguser 9y ago
        I;ve tried that approach, and its cumbersome to remember all the different commands, flags, combinations etc. I might need for each different project and for each different task. IDEs simplify this process dramatically. Its akin to GUI v DOS in terms of usability benefits.
        scott_s 9y ago
        That's fine. But myself and a lot of other people get a lot of "serious programming" done using the approach.
        ruleabidinguser 9y ago
        I don't really understand what the benefit of it is.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Do you really conflate suitable to your own tastes with being useful or not? Further in what profession is any tool "all the same" See the blub paradox.
brlewis 9y ago
I hope you're right that this goes the way of emacs. I've been productive in emacs for 30 years, but I'm growing impatient for emacs to get a real programming language with lexical scoping like they were talking about doing with Scheme 20 years ago. Despite its lack of macros, JavaScript is arguably a better Lisp than Emacs Lisp. I've toyed with Atom a couple of times recently and am seriously thinking of switching.
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  See, I just don't understand why you would want to use emacs over an editor that does all the work for you. Thats why I avoid it, it seems like a big cost that I don't have to pay if I just use a different editor.
  - brlewis 9y ago
    Whether an editor needs to be programmable or not depends on what "all the work" is. If you're doing the same exact work as everybody else then certainly a programmable editor is overkill. If your work is different, then programming is how you tell the editor what it means to do all the work for you.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    People seem to ridiculously inflate this cost. If you are going to be using a tool for 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year for the next decade then you will be using it for 20,000 hours over the next decade. Spending a few hours to configure it to your liking. In fact if you start atom and wait 6 seconds for it to start just once a day then twice wait 3 seconds for a new window you will in the same time frame have waited 8 hours for atom to start.
    - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
      Heres the thing, its a cost you pay for every single project you start and every change you make to your build system. Emacs makes it possible but hard to maneuver, by my reckoning. There are some really giant projects where that becomes reasonable, but for me thats just not the case. And if I were going to invest time like that, I'd rather invest it into an environment which has a higher ceiling for what it can do (emacs doesnt provide fast/rich/easy autocomplete, for example)
tree_of_item 9y ago
> This seems destined to go the way of emacs. Hilarious. Emacs is one of the most successful programs of all time in my book. If I ever made an editor I'd pray every night that it'd be at least half as successful as Emacs.

chickenfries 9y ago

It's a benefit if your engineers already know JavaScript, obviously. Also, emacs is one of the most successful text editors so I'm not sure I get your comparison.

ruleabidinguser 9y ago
I don't consider emacs successful. Succesful among fanatics, maybe, but I don't consider is valuable to a serious programmer. Also, surely it's not that hard to switch languages? In my experience all languages are essentially the same.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 9y ago
  >In my experience all languages are essentially the same. That's the problem: you don't seem to have enough experience.
  - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
    I dont seem to have much experience? Based on what? For having a different view than you? Isnt that a little naive? So as far as actually talking about my point goes, what exactly am I missing? There are small differences but I've never seen a language that I couldn't get up and going in over the course of a week. How much experience do you think I have? I've used plenty of languages, and I'm well aware that there are nuances.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >So as far as actually talking about my point goes, what exactly am I missing? There are small differences but I've never seen a language that I couldn't get up and going in over the course of a week. That's because you either used the languages superficially, or use only very similar languages, probably of the Algol family (e.g. Ruby, Python, PHP, JS, etc). You won't get very far with Haskell "over the course of a week". Or APL. Or Idris. Or Erlang. Or Lisp -- or any other language that's not a mere Algol derivative with some different bells and whistles. And even those have their idioms, of course, that one needs much more than a week to get competent with, but, it gets worse when we expand languages to not be "mainstream Algol derivatives". One would only be using languages like Smalltalk, OcamL, Scheme, Scala, Self, etc, superficially without getting into their idioms and nuance, which wont happen in a week (and can take years to really master).
      - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
        Well of course you can't include languages like Haskell in the group of interchangeable languages. Incidentally I have used Haskell (and it did take more than a week). But it doesn't matter because we're talking about moving JavaScript developers to Java, or C++, or as you say, Algol-likes.
        coldtea 9y ago
        >Well of course you can't include languages like Haskell in the group of interchangeable languages. Well, if you can only include "interchangeable languages" then it's not an observation but a tautology.
        ruleabidinguser 9y ago
        No kidding? What I was trying to say (I thought I was pretty clear) is that we're really only considering institutional languages here. As it turns out to my knowledge theyre basically all the same.
    - tree_of_item 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- computerex 9y ago
  Not useful to serious programmers? Do you feel the same way about Vim? Just because you haven't gotten used to using something, doesn't mean it's necessarily total shit. There is a reason why people have been using emacs for decades.
  - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
    I do actually, and I should reword that to "not useful for serious programming." VIM to me is best used for lightweight, quick and short editing tasks. THats how I use it. For any involved work, you're going to want a debugger, you're going to want automated build tools, you're going to want effortless compile/run cycles and so on.. You don't really want to implement all of that in VIM because your work won't be portable.
    - scott_s 9y ago
      I have all those. They're just not integrated into my editor. I use vim; it is my editor, but not my development environment. Unix is my development environment.
      - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
        I;ve tried that approach, and its cumbersome to remember all the different commands, flags, combinations etc. I might need for each different project and for each different task. IDEs simplify this process dramatically. Its akin to GUI v DOS in terms of usability benefits.
        scott_s 9y ago
        That's fine. But myself and a lot of other people get a lot of "serious programming" done using the approach.
        ruleabidinguser 9y ago
        I don't really understand what the benefit of it is.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Do you really conflate suitable to your own tastes with being useful or not? Further in what profession is any tool "all the same" See the blub paradox.

brlewis 9y ago

I hope you're right that this goes the way of emacs. I've been productive in emacs for 30 years, but I'm growing impatient for emacs to get a real programming language with lexical scoping like they were talking about doing with Scheme 20 years ago. Despite its lack of macros, JavaScript is arguably a better Lisp than Emacs Lisp. I've toyed with Atom a couple of times recently and am seriously thinking of switching.

ruleabidinguser 9y ago
See, I just don't understand why you would want to use emacs over an editor that does all the work for you. Thats why I avoid it, it seems like a big cost that I don't have to pay if I just use a different editor.
- brlewis 9y ago
  Whether an editor needs to be programmable or not depends on what "all the work" is. If you're doing the same exact work as everybody else then certainly a programmable editor is overkill. If your work is different, then programming is how you tell the editor what it means to do all the work for you.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  People seem to ridiculously inflate this cost. If you are going to be using a tool for 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year for the next decade then you will be using it for 20,000 hours over the next decade. Spending a few hours to configure it to your liking. In fact if you start atom and wait 6 seconds for it to start just once a day then twice wait 3 seconds for a new window you will in the same time frame have waited 8 hours for atom to start.
  - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
    Heres the thing, its a cost you pay for every single project you start and every change you make to your build system. Emacs makes it possible but hard to maneuver, by my reckoning. There are some really giant projects where that becomes reasonable, but for me thats just not the case. And if I were going to invest time like that, I'd rather invest it into an environment which has a higher ceiling for what it can do (emacs doesnt provide fast/rich/easy autocomplete, for example)

tree_of_item 9y ago

> This seems destined to go the way of emacs. Hilarious. Emacs is one of the most successful programs of all time in my book. If I ever made an editor I'd pray every night that it'd be at least half as successful as Emacs.