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I honestly do not understand how did a large part of the software engineering community get to this point of idiocy. Is this due to the principle of getting to

I honestly do not understand how did a large part of the software engineering community get to this point of idiocy. Is this due to the principle of getting to the market first and quick prototypes? I don’t see a quick way back.

matthewmacleod 8y ago
Frankly I find your view pretty offputting. I’m not really that into the idea of JS-as-a-platform, but it obviously emerged because it fulfilled certain requirements that weren’t covered elsewhere. The “way back” from this is for people like yourself to stop dismissing others’ work as “idiocy” and start building better solutions to these problems as you see them.
- walterstucco 8y ago
  It just made possible for web developers to jump on the native apps train It's hard to think of it as an improvement The idiocy is in the hundreds of engineering hours spent to build half baked solutions that never work as expected and never will It's developers not wanting to adapt, while if they spent half of that effort on red or even visual basic 6 we would have end up with something better Diversity is king, web everywhere for everything will impoverish the entire developer's community
- securityfreak 8y ago
  Maybe "idiocy" is unnecessarily strong, but I certainly don't have to praise all emerging experiments just to sound polite, do I? The emerging of all these stacks is because of approachability. Everyone has a browser. Anyone who wants to create their first website can do so, by opening up e.g. notepad. By this approach you get low-quality, self-taught JS "experts" who are much cheaper to hire than a proper software engineer with fundamentals of computer science. After a few years these developers feel so confident, they decide to launch their own perfect new framework/library to solve all the problems they experienced! There is a better solution. It's called native app development, without a hyphen of any sorts in front of "native". Different platforms have different quirks and there is no way to have the exact same UI/UX on all platforms. The true challenge is to explain the executives, that hiring 2 developers will be much better in the long run, than 1 underpaid JS developer for all platforms.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    > but I certainly don't have to praise all emerging experiments just to sound polite, do I? Speaking from personal experience, I have found it vastly more productive to focus on the good than the bad. Yes, even in situations where the other person is literally [1] too dumb to put their underwear on correctly without assistance. I don’t know how or why it works to do that, but it does, and the improvement from doing so is immense. [1] Alzheimer’s.
  - m_fayer 8y ago
    I used to agree with you. But over the last few years, in their own ways, Apple and Microsoft have dropped the ball on their native desktop UI toolkits. So, whereas the argument for native used to be "rewrite your client once per platform, and you get a better language, better performance, better usability, and a better development experience", now it's "rewrite your client once per platform and you may get a better language, depending on your taste, probably better performance, an aging closed-source toolchain, an outdated development paradigm, outdated APIs covered in legacy-barnacles, debugging-resistant performance pitfalls, and decent usability if you're ok with a generic one-size-fits-all look (and you're on your own if you're not.)" In other words, the argument for native, and native development itself, is not aging well.
  - jstewartmobile 8y ago
    it will get worse before it gets worser
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I’m not really that into the idea of JS-as-a-platform, but it obviously emerged because it fulfilled certain requirements that weren’t covered elsewhere. Maybe they weren't covered for a reason? The ability to have your web team churn out lowest common denominator bloated JS based mobile/desktop apps was not a real requirement, more like a wish of some. Now businesses do that just because they can.
  - fvdessen 8y ago
    They do it simply because it's the most cost effective solution overall.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Yes. It's the most cost-effective solution, because: - we haven't figured out how to make companies care about "delivering value" part of the "delivering value in exchange for money" work, and - we allow them to dump externalities on users without consequences or compensation. So the most cost-effective solution in this scheme will be a half-assed product that's barely good enough to be sellable, and which makes my computer use more electricity while being less capable of running software simultaneously.
      - Can_Not 8y ago
        And the whole point of native components in Vue/react is to reduce those negative externalities, but the first thread I see in this post is criticizing Vue for sharing from react's ecosystem instead of inventing an indentical solution from scratch?
      - qaq 8y ago
        At the current rate we will soon have phones with 8GB RAM and who knows how many cores not having to rewrite same code 3 times in 3 lang. will def. be catching on more.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
re-actor 8y ago
We are in the odd position where HTML + JS + UI framework (Vue/React) is just by far the best way to create good user interfaces. The performance hit is not going to stop anyone from using or developing software like this. There is NO good alternative.
- sireat 8y ago
  For certain values of good user interfaces perhaps. There has got to be a better way forward for mobile UI. For desktop creating UI on something like QT designer or XAML on WPF is way more pleasant than HTML+JS+UI framework . Even Actionscript was less convoluted that this mess. I love writing React code but these abstractions are getting too elaborate. I had high hopes for WebComponents but support for those seems to be stagnating.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mlsarecmg 8y ago
    Xaml and Wpf? Qt? I am honestly asking you, have you worked with React before? XAML has a learning curve of 2 years and more to get to expert level. I developed with it for more or less 5 years and i still have nightmares. Qt and the others are all imperative layout inflaters. React was a revolution, maybe the first cross platform paradigm that actually made sense. A learning curve that doesn't span more than a day. In all my years as a frontend developer i haven't seen a simpler way to create user interfaces. And sure as hell i would prefer React on the desktop or mobile over aged native toolkits that still struggle with obsolete oop-mvc-templating semantics, especially wpf and xaml, which in my opinion where the sole reason why i started hating my job.
    - sireat 8y ago
      I love writing React code and it is easy to get up to speed there. I abhor the mix of HTML/CSS for UI design. I'd rather code UIs in Actionscript. The web browser as an abstraction for general use UIs is just not ideal. XAML might be a company induced mess underneath but my point is that you don't have to be XAML expert to make nice interfaces. I made CRUD apps on WPF and rarely did I have to touch XAML directly. I had a big thick book on XAML and it sat unopened on my shelf. I am forced to do front-end webdev work and I hate it. I need to worry about UI breaking instead of worrying about business logic. Let's say client needs a dropdown menu added at a certain location. On desktop this is cake on most toolkits. On web the problem is that there is no certain location, there is no absolute. You have to delve deep into CSS abyss to figure out how the component will behave.
ergothus 8y ago
I find it entertaining that you post this a within 24 hours of the linus/tanenbaum rehash. Getting crap done counts for a lot. Web, and hci in general, isnt figured out well at all, so we can spend a few decades pursuing an ideal we don't even have defined...or we can get stuff done. If you are arguing for some specific non-"idiocy", please, explain why your version hasn't taken off.
- mastazi 8y ago
  > I find it entertaining that you post this a within 24 hours of the linus/tanenbaum rehash. Do you have a link about this latest rehash? I tried googling without success
  - ergothus 8y ago
    Sorry for the late reply - the article is old, but the HN link (and comments) is recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17294907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17294907
- paulie_a 8y ago
  > getting crap done Yeah you end up with crap.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
It's all about developer productivity and nothing else. Well, maybe a healthy dose of cargo cutting. But anyway, no care is really given anymore about resource usage, etc because all of that is abundant. I personally don't like it as I think it's wasteful and careless.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > no care is really given anymore about resource usage, etc because all of that is abundant. They're abundant for people who you only think about themselves. Who believe that their application will be the only one running on the machine. Which may be the case if you're developing software for touchscreens on a factory floor, but is definitely not true for end-user software, and doubly not true for anything on the web.
rimliu 8y ago
Non-serious: maybe they have to spend so much time chasing the latest trends in JS frameworks that none is left to learn about alternatives. Semi-seriuos: I am afraid many honestly believe that JS is the best language and has the best ecosystem. I consider myself lucky having learnt programming back when you had no choice but to use different tools/languages for different tasks. It provides with a luxury of being able to compare different approaches.
izacus 8y ago
Nah it's the culture - at some point someone started teaching people that learning new programming languages and more fitting tools is hard. So now there's a whole herd of people who refuse to learn anything but JS and then spend time wrapping the wrappers and debugging them instead of taking a tool better fitted for the task.

matthewmacleod 8y ago

Frankly I find your view pretty offputting. I’m not really that into the idea of JS-as-a-platform, but it obviously emerged because it fulfilled certain requirements that weren’t covered elsewhere. The “way back” from this is for people like yourself to stop dismissing others’ work as “idiocy” and start building better solutions to these problems as you see them.

walterstucco 8y ago
It just made possible for web developers to jump on the native apps train It's hard to think of it as an improvement The idiocy is in the hundreds of engineering hours spent to build half baked solutions that never work as expected and never will It's developers not wanting to adapt, while if they spent half of that effort on red or even visual basic 6 we would have end up with something better Diversity is king, web everywhere for everything will impoverish the entire developer's community
securityfreak 8y ago
Maybe "idiocy" is unnecessarily strong, but I certainly don't have to praise all emerging experiments just to sound polite, do I? The emerging of all these stacks is because of approachability. Everyone has a browser. Anyone who wants to create their first website can do so, by opening up e.g. notepad. By this approach you get low-quality, self-taught JS "experts" who are much cheaper to hire than a proper software engineer with fundamentals of computer science. After a few years these developers feel so confident, they decide to launch their own perfect new framework/library to solve all the problems they experienced! There is a better solution. It's called native app development, without a hyphen of any sorts in front of "native". Different platforms have different quirks and there is no way to have the exact same UI/UX on all platforms. The true challenge is to explain the executives, that hiring 2 developers will be much better in the long run, than 1 underpaid JS developer for all platforms.
- ben_w 8y ago
  > but I certainly don't have to praise all emerging experiments just to sound polite, do I? Speaking from personal experience, I have found it vastly more productive to focus on the good than the bad. Yes, even in situations where the other person is literally [1] too dumb to put their underwear on correctly without assistance. I don’t know how or why it works to do that, but it does, and the improvement from doing so is immense. [1] Alzheimer’s.
- m_fayer 8y ago
  I used to agree with you. But over the last few years, in their own ways, Apple and Microsoft have dropped the ball on their native desktop UI toolkits. So, whereas the argument for native used to be "rewrite your client once per platform, and you get a better language, better performance, better usability, and a better development experience", now it's "rewrite your client once per platform and you may get a better language, depending on your taste, probably better performance, an aging closed-source toolchain, an outdated development paradigm, outdated APIs covered in legacy-barnacles, debugging-resistant performance pitfalls, and decent usability if you're ok with a generic one-size-fits-all look (and you're on your own if you're not.)" In other words, the argument for native, and native development itself, is not aging well.
- jstewartmobile 8y ago
  it will get worse before it gets worser
coldtea 8y ago
>I’m not really that into the idea of JS-as-a-platform, but it obviously emerged because it fulfilled certain requirements that weren’t covered elsewhere. Maybe they weren't covered for a reason? The ability to have your web team churn out lowest common denominator bloated JS based mobile/desktop apps was not a real requirement, more like a wish of some. Now businesses do that just because they can.
- fvdessen 8y ago
  They do it simply because it's the most cost effective solution overall.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Yes. It's the most cost-effective solution, because: - we haven't figured out how to make companies care about "delivering value" part of the "delivering value in exchange for money" work, and - we allow them to dump externalities on users without consequences or compensation. So the most cost-effective solution in this scheme will be a half-assed product that's barely good enough to be sellable, and which makes my computer use more electricity while being less capable of running software simultaneously.
    - Can_Not 8y ago
      And the whole point of native components in Vue/react is to reduce those negative externalities, but the first thread I see in this post is criticizing Vue for sharing from react's ecosystem instead of inventing an indentical solution from scratch?
    - qaq 8y ago
      At the current rate we will soon have phones with 8GB RAM and who knows how many cores not having to rewrite same code 3 times in 3 lang. will def. be catching on more.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago

re-actor 8y ago

We are in the odd position where HTML + JS + UI framework (Vue/React) is just by far the best way to create good user interfaces. The performance hit is not going to stop anyone from using or developing software like this. There is NO good alternative.

sireat 8y ago
For certain values of good user interfaces perhaps. There has got to be a better way forward for mobile UI. For desktop creating UI on something like QT designer or XAML on WPF is way more pleasant than HTML+JS+UI framework . Even Actionscript was less convoluted that this mess. I love writing React code but these abstractions are getting too elaborate. I had high hopes for WebComponents but support for those seems to be stagnating.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mlsarecmg 8y ago
  Xaml and Wpf? Qt? I am honestly asking you, have you worked with React before? XAML has a learning curve of 2 years and more to get to expert level. I developed with it for more or less 5 years and i still have nightmares. Qt and the others are all imperative layout inflaters. React was a revolution, maybe the first cross platform paradigm that actually made sense. A learning curve that doesn't span more than a day. In all my years as a frontend developer i haven't seen a simpler way to create user interfaces. And sure as hell i would prefer React on the desktop or mobile over aged native toolkits that still struggle with obsolete oop-mvc-templating semantics, especially wpf and xaml, which in my opinion where the sole reason why i started hating my job.
  - sireat 8y ago
    I love writing React code and it is easy to get up to speed there. I abhor the mix of HTML/CSS for UI design. I'd rather code UIs in Actionscript. The web browser as an abstraction for general use UIs is just not ideal. XAML might be a company induced mess underneath but my point is that you don't have to be XAML expert to make nice interfaces. I made CRUD apps on WPF and rarely did I have to touch XAML directly. I had a big thick book on XAML and it sat unopened on my shelf. I am forced to do front-end webdev work and I hate it. I need to worry about UI breaking instead of worrying about business logic. Let's say client needs a dropdown menu added at a certain location. On desktop this is cake on most toolkits. On web the problem is that there is no certain location, there is no absolute. You have to delve deep into CSS abyss to figure out how the component will behave.

ergothus 8y ago

I find it entertaining that you post this a within 24 hours of the linus/tanenbaum rehash. Getting crap done counts for a lot. Web, and hci in general, isnt figured out well at all, so we can spend a few decades pursuing an ideal we don't even have defined...or we can get stuff done. If you are arguing for some specific non-"idiocy", please, explain why your version hasn't taken off.

mastazi 8y ago
> I find it entertaining that you post this a within 24 hours of the linus/tanenbaum rehash. Do you have a link about this latest rehash? I tried googling without success
- ergothus 8y ago
  Sorry for the late reply - the article is old, but the HN link (and comments) is recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17294907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17294907
paulie_a 8y ago
> getting crap done Yeah you end up with crap.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

It's all about developer productivity and nothing else. Well, maybe a healthy dose of cargo cutting. But anyway, no care is really given anymore about resource usage, etc because all of that is abundant. I personally don't like it as I think it's wasteful and careless.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> no care is really given anymore about resource usage, etc because all of that is abundant. They're abundant for people who you only think about themselves. Who believe that their application will be the only one running on the machine. Which may be the case if you're developing software for touchscreens on a factory floor, but is definitely not true for end-user software, and doubly not true for anything on the web.

rimliu 8y ago

Non-serious: maybe they have to spend so much time chasing the latest trends in JS frameworks that none is left to learn about alternatives. Semi-seriuos: I am afraid many honestly believe that JS is the best language and has the best ecosystem. I consider myself lucky having learnt programming back when you had no choice but to use different tools/languages for different tasks. It provides with a luxury of being able to compare different approaches.

izacus 8y ago

Nah it's the culture - at some point someone started teaching people that learning new programming languages and more fitting tools is hard. So now there's a whole herd of people who refuse to learn anything but JS and then spend time wrapping the wrappers and debugging them instead of taking a tool better fitted for the task.