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It's funny to see facts down-voted by an usually well informed and rational public. :-D Still, facts are facts, no matter how sloppy the wording I've chose. I

It's funny to see facts down-voted by an usually well informed and rational public. :-D Still, facts are facts, no matter how sloppy the wording I've chose. I didn't mean to diminish the effort put into that one incarnation of those so called design systems. I've only mentioned that it's (like all others of the "modern" ones I've seen until now) light years behind what you could have got 10+ years ago. If I would like to really offend some people here I would have said that actually Visual Basic 6 was far more advanced than today's "web component libraries" when it comes to building GUIs. Most likely this could be even proved: One would only need to build (from scratch) a typical GUI for some business app with web-tech and VB6 against a timer. I know on which tech I would bet delivering results faster. ;-) Not that I'm saying a VB6 app would be a proper replacement for a web app, that's not the point. But the productivity of web tech for application development is just somewhere on the level of 20 years ago. But the down-voters are likely just to young to know that. So the down-votes are likely fine. :-)

duderific 6y ago
> But the productivity of web tech for application development is just somewhere on the level of 20 years ago To be fair, the web was never meant to be an application development platform. It has only become that because of the ubiquity of the web, and the many advantages that web applications confer (multi-platform, instant updates etc.) Given that, it's not surprising that the web application space continues to evolve as new solutions are tried, iterated and adopted widely, or abandoned.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  > the web was never meant to be an application development platform That! Exactly that! That's the point. But for some strange reasons people get offended if you tell them this. Maybe because you telling them they're using the wrong tool? Even if it's obvious? ;-)
- crubier 6y ago
  Indeed the web was not initially meant to be an application development platform. But it has been meant to be one now for 10+ years, basically since chrome arrived, along with ideas like chrome OS and others... And as a matter of fact it is now the most ubiquitous application development platform.
solidasparagus 6y ago
At least for me I find it very hard to believe your rosy story about Dojo. Are you telling me that 15 years ago you were using a framework that had out-of-the-box support for internationalization that is comparable to what we have today?
- still_grokking 6y ago
  Nobody needs to believe me. I've left a link. Anybody really interested is free to see for them self. The stuff is still out there. (Actually I've looked lately into their forum to see how this ancient stuff is doing after I've left it years ago, and you can read there for example form people that have a very hard time to find reasons to rewrite all their "legacy Dojo apps" as that stuff is still working more then fine for mission critical projects so management won't give any budget). One of the reasons we chose Dojo back than was for example its first class internalization support. And yes, you have for example all widgets with right-to-left variant support OOTB… Or you had some DateTime class that had more or less all the features of Moment.js (years before Moment.js came into existence)… Ah, you had actually a "class" ("dojo declare" if I remember correctly)! :-) It had multiple inheritance (mixins) as this is quite useful for widgets and their common traits. It had observable data stores & pub / sub messaging. It fully supported screen readers OOTB (accessibility is quite important for example if you develop for state authorities; one more of the reasons we chose it back than). As the "modern" stuff "started" (at the time Angular.js got quite popular) my first impression of that "modern" frameworks was that I'm literally back to stone age. At least it felt like that. You needed for "everything" some third party lib, nothing was integrated, features were missing everywhere. Additionally working with something like Bower and Grunt was a big step backwards compared to the integrated build system of Dojo. It bundled, and even Closure compiled, all of your modules / widgets, building optimized "layers", with moderate configuration. It had the features you got back years later with Webpack. Actually I'm not sure Webpack isn't also an extended standalone version of Dojos build system as I was wondering when working for the first time with Webpack that the configuration file looks so familiar… (Like Require.js is for sure derived form Dojo's AMD loader). And the main point is: Even Dojo was ahead of its time in JS land, it was "just" a shallow JS port of the style of application frameworks you had for desktop dev. Ever worked with Delphi, or so? Even though people made jokes about the term "RAD" back than this was indeed "rapid application development" compared to all that low level pixel-shoving you do today. The "components" you worked with back than where one level above something like React-Admin (which is for Web land already bombastic!). The main point is, and I guess this is clear to most: The web wasn't build as an application platform. As such a platform it just sucks. That's a fact, imho. And I think everybody who did desktop development back than would agree. I don't say the web is a bad thing as such. Also I fully understand the reasons why it's misused as an application platform (it has just some very convincing advantages). But that doesn't change imho anything about the fact that "the web" sucks as application development platform. It's obviously the wrong tool… (Even without any alternative at the moment). This issue won't go away with the next rehash of some lib / framework that "makes using the wrong tool a little bit more convenient". We need a new tool. One that it designed form the ground up to be again a proper application development framework. I want to see true productivity improvements compared to the time of "RAD"; not steps back on any axis, be it effort to develop something high level, be it performance, be it resource usage. Where is the Delphi / VB6 of the new century? Smart people here around. Someone will come up with something sooner or later, I'm quite sure! :-D
imvetri 6y ago
Down votes are fun. A good sign of being right and others being wrong. :)

duderific 6y ago

> But the productivity of web tech for application development is just somewhere on the level of 20 years ago To be fair, the web was never meant to be an application development platform. It has only become that because of the ubiquity of the web, and the many advantages that web applications confer (multi-platform, instant updates etc.) Given that, it's not surprising that the web application space continues to evolve as new solutions are tried, iterated and adopted widely, or abandoned.

still_grokking 6y ago
> the web was never meant to be an application development platform That! Exactly that! That's the point. But for some strange reasons people get offended if you tell them this. Maybe because you telling them they're using the wrong tool? Even if it's obvious? ;-)
crubier 6y ago
Indeed the web was not initially meant to be an application development platform. But it has been meant to be one now for 10+ years, basically since chrome arrived, along with ideas like chrome OS and others... And as a matter of fact it is now the most ubiquitous application development platform.

solidasparagus 6y ago

At least for me I find it very hard to believe your rosy story about Dojo. Are you telling me that 15 years ago you were using a framework that had out-of-the-box support for internationalization that is comparable to what we have today?

still_grokking 6y ago
Nobody needs to believe me. I've left a link. Anybody really interested is free to see for them self. The stuff is still out there. (Actually I've looked lately into their forum to see how this ancient stuff is doing after I've left it years ago, and you can read there for example form people that have a very hard time to find reasons to rewrite all their "legacy Dojo apps" as that stuff is still working more then fine for mission critical projects so management won't give any budget). One of the reasons we chose Dojo back than was for example its first class internalization support. And yes, you have for example all widgets with right-to-left variant support OOTB… Or you had some DateTime class that had more or less all the features of Moment.js (years before Moment.js came into existence)… Ah, you had actually a "class" ("dojo declare" if I remember correctly)! :-) It had multiple inheritance (mixins) as this is quite useful for widgets and their common traits. It had observable data stores & pub / sub messaging. It fully supported screen readers OOTB (accessibility is quite important for example if you develop for state authorities; one more of the reasons we chose it back than). As the "modern" stuff "started" (at the time Angular.js got quite popular) my first impression of that "modern" frameworks was that I'm literally back to stone age. At least it felt like that. You needed for "everything" some third party lib, nothing was integrated, features were missing everywhere. Additionally working with something like Bower and Grunt was a big step backwards compared to the integrated build system of Dojo. It bundled, and even Closure compiled, all of your modules / widgets, building optimized "layers", with moderate configuration. It had the features you got back years later with Webpack. Actually I'm not sure Webpack isn't also an extended standalone version of Dojos build system as I was wondering when working for the first time with Webpack that the configuration file looks so familiar… (Like Require.js is for sure derived form Dojo's AMD loader). And the main point is: Even Dojo was ahead of its time in JS land, it was "just" a shallow JS port of the style of application frameworks you had for desktop dev. Ever worked with Delphi, or so? Even though people made jokes about the term "RAD" back than this was indeed "rapid application development" compared to all that low level pixel-shoving you do today. The "components" you worked with back than where one level above something like React-Admin (which is for Web land already bombastic!). The main point is, and I guess this is clear to most: The web wasn't build as an application platform. As such a platform it just sucks. That's a fact, imho. And I think everybody who did desktop development back than would agree. I don't say the web is a bad thing as such. Also I fully understand the reasons why it's misused as an application platform (it has just some very convincing advantages). But that doesn't change imho anything about the fact that "the web" sucks as application development platform. It's obviously the wrong tool… (Even without any alternative at the moment). This issue won't go away with the next rehash of some lib / framework that "makes using the wrong tool a little bit more convenient". We need a new tool. One that it designed form the ground up to be again a proper application development framework. I want to see true productivity improvements compared to the time of "RAD"; not steps back on any axis, be it effort to develop something high level, be it performance, be it resource usage. Where is the Delphi / VB6 of the new century? Smart people here around. Someone will come up with something sooner or later, I'm quite sure! :-D

imvetri 6y ago

Down votes are fun. A good sign of being right and others being wrong. :)