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They answered this at the end of the article: “The Deno company hopes to enable the millions of web programmers out there to maximally leverage their craft in o

They answered this at the end of the article: “The Deno company hopes to enable the millions of web programmers out there to maximally leverage their craft in other domains.” It takes time to learn an ecosystem, and when people know one ecosystem and not another, most people would rather do high skill, high value work in the ecosystem they know than start over as a noob in a new one. The only thing unique about the web / JavaScript land is its ubiquity and size due to its place as the language of the browser. So anyone who can make an abstraction that lets JavaScript developers do stuff outside the browser without learning much new has a virtually guaranteed large audience of developers who are likely to think “I would love to be able to build X, I just don’t have time to learn a new ecosystem.” Those folks are then thrilled to dive in and use the new abstraction. And there are a lot of those people. And that’s why we are all stuck using Electron apps for so much stuff. :) But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Electron can evolve to be less of a resource hog, and better alternatives are being tested all the time. The same is true for other non-browser applications of JavaScript. I don’t know if this vision is reality, but I think that it may be that we’re in the early days of a transition toward the browser stack being the new “GUI.” Which is to say, back in the 80s there was a lot of debate around GUIs and whether they were a good idea etc., and while most people liked them to some degree, they also lamented the idea of losing the command line. But in the end, GUIs didn’t shrink the number of CLI tools in the world, rather they increased the size of the domain that computers are used for my making it more accessible to more people. I think that so far the web vs native debate seems to be following a similar trajectory.

scaladev 6y ago
> It just exists because JavaScript developers don’t want to learn something new. Are you sure? I started building a desktop application recently. As much as I abhor Electron and refuse to touch anything built on top of it, there basically wasn't any other choice due to the absolutely massive amounts of libraries written for the web. I threw a couple of them in and it saved me at least 90% of work compared to what I would have to do if I'd chosen Qt (or anything else native). Would I rather spend a week and have something to show to my client, or roll up my sleeves and re-implement everything myself (which would take about half a year before I'd have anything working at all)? (For the record, I didn't downvote you. I consider it a shitty practice to downvote somebody for their opinion, without even replying.)
- burlesona 6y ago
  Yeah, and I meant that with a wink then wrote at lengthy justification for that thinking, lol. Oh well, I rephrased to take out the jest. I don’t disagree with you about why people use Electron. There’s a positive feedback loop around ecosystem sizes. The bigger the platform the more devs use it the more tools they make the more libraries are made the more it’s the easiest way to do X the more applications are written for it the bigger the platform gets. Anything you can offer to a large group of developers that lets them extend their existing high skill level to new domains where they would otherwise be novices is very likely to be adopted.
- BackBlast 6y ago
  PWA installs are another way to get onto a system. It's less resource intensive as you leverage the browser already installed on the system. It doesn't work if you need extensive access to local hardware. But if you're mainly on the network anyway to operate, it's very frictionless and relatively lean. With my last app, the network asset bundle is about 2MB, uses only ~11 MB on disk on my Mac and ~25MB RAM when running.

scaladev 6y ago

> It just exists because JavaScript developers don’t want to learn something new. Are you sure? I started building a desktop application recently. As much as I abhor Electron and refuse to touch anything built on top of it, there basically wasn't any other choice due to the absolutely massive amounts of libraries written for the web. I threw a couple of them in and it saved me at least 90% of work compared to what I would have to do if I'd chosen Qt (or anything else native). Would I rather spend a week and have something to show to my client, or roll up my sleeves and re-implement everything myself (which would take about half a year before I'd have anything working at all)? (For the record, I didn't downvote you. I consider it a shitty practice to downvote somebody for their opinion, without even replying.)

burlesona 6y ago
Yeah, and I meant that with a wink then wrote at lengthy justification for that thinking, lol. Oh well, I rephrased to take out the jest. I don’t disagree with you about why people use Electron. There’s a positive feedback loop around ecosystem sizes. The bigger the platform the more devs use it the more tools they make the more libraries are made the more it’s the easiest way to do X the more applications are written for it the bigger the platform gets. Anything you can offer to a large group of developers that lets them extend their existing high skill level to new domains where they would otherwise be novices is very likely to be adopted.
BackBlast 6y ago
PWA installs are another way to get onto a system. It's less resource intensive as you leverage the browser already installed on the system. It doesn't work if you need extensive access to local hardware. But if you're mainly on the network anyway to operate, it's very frictionless and relatively lean. With my last app, the network asset bundle is about 2MB, uses only ~11 MB on disk on my Mac and ~25MB RAM when running.