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It is true. The entire point of things like Electron is so you don't have to learn another language, continuing to use JS skills, and not branching out into oth

It is true. The entire point of things like Electron is so you don't have to learn another language, continuing to use JS skills, and not branching out into other things. Electron itself may be in C++, but I'd wager that very few of those using Electron as a GUI toolkit are diving that deep.

WorldMaker 9y ago
You seem to have a lot of interesting base assumptions in your assertion. Is "continuing to use JS skills" a bad thing? What makes "branching out into other things" a better thing? We will likely continue to disagree that JS is a bad language. While I agree that learning a gamut of languages is a good idea for any developer (and will heavily encourage devs to challenge themselves to try to learn different languages with different paradigms to keep from growing "stale", to keep up lifetime learning), it's not positive or negative value for a platform like Electron if it "requires" learning a new language to use it. Do you maybe think people are more likely to learn JS as a first language? That too is an interesting assumption. Beyond those value opinions, existing JS skills may not be the only reason to use Electron. Existing HTML/CSS skills may be the more important reason for some developers. Cross-platform GUI toolkits haven't kept up with HTML/CSS in a lot of areas including ease of testing and availability of designers with design skills. Use of JS may be entirely orthogonal to that decision. (Certainly in my own usages of Electron, that has been the larger factor. Xamarin seems like the next best bet, but it's still a lot easier for very small teams with no platform-specific UI designers on hand to audition design work in a handful of browsers than to bounce back and forth between a variety of iOS and Android emulators and devices.) Whether or not that it is "very few" people using Electron today that don't also want to directly use JS is a demographic question that you also seem to conflict with some sort of value judgment. Even if "very few" people are using anything more than "just JS", that doesn't mean it is valueless that people have an option to leverage Electron with other languages. Even if demograghics did matter, I already pointed to a case where Rust-sourced code is shipping in major Electron apps (I know VSCode has dependency, I believe Atom has a dependency). VSCode is written entirely in Typescript, and I don't think it's the only major Electron project doing so (and if we start to play the dependencies game, a lot of Open Source in the Node world is Typescript). Even Atom seems mostly "vanilla" JS, but still has ~7% of its source in CofeeScript, and its "vanilla" JS has a lot of ES2015+-isms that would look unrecognizable to older versions of JS, and I've heard it argued that ES2015+ starts to be a different language than what a lot of people that have not followed JS in the last few years imagine when they discuss JS.

WorldMaker 9y ago

You seem to have a lot of interesting base assumptions in your assertion. Is "continuing to use JS skills" a bad thing? What makes "branching out into other things" a better thing? We will likely continue to disagree that JS is a bad language. While I agree that learning a gamut of languages is a good idea for any developer (and will heavily encourage devs to challenge themselves to try to learn different languages with different paradigms to keep from growing "stale", to keep up lifetime learning), it's not positive or negative value for a platform like Electron if it "requires" learning a new language to use it. Do you maybe think people are more likely to learn JS as a first language? That too is an interesting assumption. Beyond those value opinions, existing JS skills may not be the only reason to use Electron. Existing HTML/CSS skills may be the more important reason for some developers. Cross-platform GUI toolkits haven't kept up with HTML/CSS in a lot of areas including ease of testing and availability of designers with design skills. Use of JS may be entirely orthogonal to that decision. (Certainly in my own usages of Electron, that has been the larger factor. Xamarin seems like the next best bet, but it's still a lot easier for very small teams with no platform-specific UI designers on hand to audition design work in a handful of browsers than to bounce back and forth between a variety of iOS and Android emulators and devices.) Whether or not that it is "very few" people using Electron today that don't also want to directly use JS is a demographic question that you also seem to conflict with some sort of value judgment. Even if "very few" people are using anything more than "just JS", that doesn't mean it is valueless that people have an option to leverage Electron with other languages. Even if demograghics did matter, I already pointed to a case where Rust-sourced code is shipping in major Electron apps (I know VSCode has dependency, I believe Atom has a dependency). VSCode is written entirely in Typescript, and I don't think it's the only major Electron project doing so (and if we start to play the dependencies game, a lot of Open Source in the Node world is Typescript). Even Atom seems mostly "vanilla" JS, but still has ~7% of its source in CofeeScript, and its "vanilla" JS has a lot of ES2015+-isms that would look unrecognizable to older versions of JS, and I've heard it argued that ES2015+ starts to be a different language than what a lot of people that have not followed JS in the last few years imagine when they discuss JS.