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The problem is that, just like Java, electron wins at the end of the day in terms of market share. If we're in the business of helping people, we can do more "g

The problem is that, just like Java, electron wins at the end of the day in terms of market share. If we're in the business of helping people, we can do more "good" by making an inferior technology slightly more bearable. Of course, that is just one perspective (not mine but one that I'm trying to understand as well). Edit spelling

snarfy 9y ago
It reduces software development costs, allowing more software to be written. There is plenty of software that needs to be written that doesn't exist today. Reducing costs helps with that need. The other side of that is software that already exists, running in the background unnoticed. Things like your graphics driver. You wouldn't want that written in Java. If it were written in Java you might get a lot of features faster, but it sure would perform like crap. For core software like that, development costs are secondary. Performance matters first. At the end of the day I think we need projects like neovim and oni. Editors are old technology and should be core software. Performance in my editor matters. I have five different IDEs installed and I still use vim.
izacus 9y ago
> The problem is that, just like Java, electron wins at the end of the day in terms of market share. The hell are you talking about, Electron still doesn't come near the marketshare when you look at acual apps using other cross-platform GUI toolkits.
cmiles74 9y ago
I don't think Java ever "won" in the cross-platform GUI application space. Sun tried hard and Swing was successful in terms of being able to produce a reliable, cross-platform experience that was reasonable. But in terms of developer mind-share and actual applications on the desktop, I'd say it's success was pretty meager. Aside from IntelliJ and NetBeans and Eclipse (yep, I know, SWT) I'm hard pressed to think of other popular Java GUI applications.

snarfy 9y ago

It reduces software development costs, allowing more software to be written. There is plenty of software that needs to be written that doesn't exist today. Reducing costs helps with that need. The other side of that is software that already exists, running in the background unnoticed. Things like your graphics driver. You wouldn't want that written in Java. If it were written in Java you might get a lot of features faster, but it sure would perform like crap. For core software like that, development costs are secondary. Performance matters first. At the end of the day I think we need projects like neovim and oni. Editors are old technology and should be core software. Performance in my editor matters. I have five different IDEs installed and I still use vim.

izacus 9y ago

> The problem is that, just like Java, electron wins at the end of the day in terms of market share. The hell are you talking about, Electron still doesn't come near the marketshare when you look at acual apps using other cross-platform GUI toolkits.

cmiles74 9y ago

I don't think Java ever "won" in the cross-platform GUI application space. Sun tried hard and Swing was successful in terms of being able to produce a reliable, cross-platform experience that was reasonable. But in terms of developer mind-share and actual applications on the desktop, I'd say it's success was pretty meager. Aside from IntelliJ and NetBeans and Eclipse (yep, I know, SWT) I'm hard pressed to think of other popular Java GUI applications.