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Asking this question without looking at the underlying platform is ignoring a huge source of insight into the problem and its solutions. Growing up from a docu
by spankalee 8y ago
Asking this question without looking at the underlying platform is ignoring a huge source of insight into the problem and its solutions.
Growing up from a document viewer to an app platform in the particular way it did left the web as the most important and ubiquitous GUI app deployment and runtime platform, but without a dev-accessible native GUI component system. No other major modern UI platform was _ever_ in this state.
This left all the work of creating the most basic widget system to userland, while at the same time the platform's features available to that userland were relatively paltry to begin with. As those features of JavaScript and DOM grew, frameworks were released frequently because newer ones were designed to take advantage of newer features. This lead to a huge amount of fragmentation.
Which brings us to now. Outside of threading, the runtime features are much more suitable to an app platform now, and finally the web has a native UI component system in Web Components. I think there's one or two more big shifts ahead of us toward Web Components and better utilizing Workers, and then things will settle down because we'll finally all be using the same platform features. Even if we still have opinionated and helpful layers on top, the foundation will be more stable and standardized.
- paulddraper 8y ago> Growing up from a document viewer to an app platform in the particular way it did left the web as the most important and ubiquitous GUI app deployment and runtime platform, but without a dev-accessible native GUI component system. Exactly this. Web technologies cannot be understood without understanding the history of the web itself. You could just as easily imagine, say (random example), Internet + Gopher + Lisp playing the role of Internet + HTTP/HTML + JS. It was somewhat inevitable chain of events, plus "right time, right place"for particular choices of tech.
- thisrod 8y ago> It was somewhat inevitable chain of events The question that intrigues me is why Tcl/Tk didn't take off around 1995. We could have had internet apps about a decade before web apps were feasible. The only answer I can think of is that no one in 1995 would have contemplated running a Tcl script that their computer had just downloaded from a random host, but Javascript boiled that frog gradually. I'd be keen to hear other ideas.
- blacksqr 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380044