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Can't similar things be said for node.js and other tech? Electron apps perhaps? What problems did these technologies solve? Mostly I agree with you, but coming

• cletus 7y ago
  > node.js I don't have a strong opinion on Node. > Electron apps perhaps? Hate them with a passion. > What problems did these technologies solve? Node.js to is primarily a platform for high-concurrency event-driven request handling where each request itself is a single thread. In my day job I primarily write Hack (PHP) nowadays. PHP embraced this model years ago and I, personally, think it's pretty much ideal for something most often used to service HTTP requests. You almost never want to be in the business of starting and coordinating threads. It gains you a lot of complexity and a lot more failure modes for very little benefit over the single thread per request model (combined with async/await programming, in particular). Electron is, in my opinion, trash. It's a cheap and crappy way for people to create desktop apps that have a much larger attack surface than any native desktop app (being the entire Chrome runtime) and a huge memory footprint all for the privilege of being able to use HTML/CSS to layout your app. > and prefer things in a familiar format So this explains a lot of the things you see from Google. Google engineers, in general, look down on Javascript. There's actually a hierarchy. The C++ engineers look down on anything that isn't C++. Java engineers look down on anything that isn't C++/Java (and sometimes even C++ is looked down on) and so on. A lot of Google JS is written for the Closure compiler. This was an early effort to add type hints to JS code. If you look at the code you can tell it's written by Java engineers. I like to quip that "Closure puts the Java into Javascript". The JsDoc comment format is basically Javadoc. The type system is familiar to those coming from Java. So you have GWT, which seemed to appeal to people who though tit would allow them to not need to know anything about JS [insert standard reference to the Joel Spolsky's "leaky abstraction" essay]. Closure tries to remake JS into Java. What these things tell you is the people coming up with these ideas don't really understand Javascript and more to the point, they don't think they have to nor do they want to. > I also sometimes feel like javascript and the web in general is a mess Everything is a mess if you look closely enough.
  • omnimus 7y ago
    Does Hack somehow add async to php (like swoole?). It seems to me that PHP and Node are pretty different. PHP is thread per connection and no async, node is just one single thread and you write as much async as you can. Pretty different modes of thinking apply.
• nojvek 7y ago
  I don’t understand the electron hate. VSCode is an electron app and is amazing. It continues to get developer mindshare like wildfire. Electron promises same code works on web, Mac, Windows, Linux. I don’t see anything come close to it’s offering. Surely I’d love electron to share the memory footprint with installed chrome. The execution could be improved (I imagine someone at MS is working on it, now that Edge is also Chromium powered).