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And instead of making cross-platform native software toolkits to ease that burden, the industry decided to reinvent the entire von Neumann architecture in inter
by vsw02 5y ago
And instead of making cross-platform native software toolkits to ease that burden, the industry decided to reinvent the entire von Neumann architecture in interpreted JavaScript and dub it “assembly,” whatever that means. Then since you’re already in a browser at that point, why not phone home and say hi, and anyone who dares to instead suggest that software operate without an Internet connection is told “just stop” because the “market has spoken” and absolutely no progress was made in software engineering until the pointless backlog that nobody looks at was pointlessly filled by pointless, automated telemetry.
Industry practices collapse under the weight of their own complexity and people argue on HN about it with absolutely no context on the real issue, just presupposed bugbears like “privacy”. Video at 11.
JavaScript is the single worst thing to happen to computing in its history. Maybe not the language itself - it’s fine enough for its purposes - but the industry deciding that its purposes overlap with a wildcard glob is a huge mistake that we will be paying for long after everyone in this conversation is deceased. It’s annoying that you credit that situation to JavaScript and laud it given what else comes with doing everything in a browser (enabling the surveillance economy, inadvertent network dependencies, computers running at about 5% ability, etc etc)
- pjmlp 5y ago> And instead of making cross-platform native software toolkits to ease that burden They exist since decades, but apparently C and C++ are even more hated than JavaScript.
- vsw02 5y agoNo, they don’t. If they did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Since you’ll probably pedant me with several names I can already think of, it’s worth remembering that existing does not imply easing burden nor being useful beyond a README and a weekend jog.
- pjmlp 5y agoI could teach you with 30 year experience writing GUIs, but most likely that would require listing several names that you already know. So lets spend ourselves some time that you can get yourself improving your Electron skills instead.
- azangru 5y ago> enabling the surveillance economy, inadvertent network dependencies, computers running at about 5% ability, etc etc I can give you computers running slower. As for the surveillance economy, I am not sure why you think that installing someone else's crap on your computer is preferable compared to running that crap in your browser and blowing most of it away every time you leave the site (or blowing it away completely by clearing your browser's storage). As for network dependencies, websites are now perfectly capable of running offline, while native apps may need network access for doing anything useful as much as a browser app does. As a developer, I would rather write once and run everywhere. As a user, I would rather not install hundreds of megabytes of someone else's "apps" that could have been a web page on my computer, other than the bare necessities that I am comfortable with. Nor do I particularly care to update those installed apps locally, downloading hundreds of megabytes more or having the risk to run into software version issues. Having vim on my machine is fine. Having Facebook, or Twitter, or Reddit is not.