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This means that software development is a failing discipline. All we can do is to come up with ever more ridiculous layers of complexity on top of mindboggling

This means that software development is a failing discipline. All we can do is to come up with ever more ridiculous layers of complexity on top of mindboggling complexity, recursively. All of this is totally self-inflicted. The problem domains that our software needs to deal with are complex enough. But we keep piling on shit of our own making. If this is what software development has become, then there's no way it won't end in total and utter disaster when people start to recognize the already all too common piss poor products that barely manage to do the absolute minimum and rebel against them. It may not be marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation who'll be lined up against the wall first, but software developers when the revolution comes. Crap. I'm now old enough to remember when computers were fast. :(

cyanydeez 5y ago
Yawn. What's important to the majority of computing tasks is boring, doesn't need super computer sppeds or IoT sized products This lament is really narrow sighted. Resources are cheap for the majority
- wtetzner 5y ago
  > Resources are cheap for the majority Sure, if you're OK with running only one or two applications at a time. Also, if applications were written with care toward performance/resources, imagine how much more those applications could do?
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  This doesn't scale though. My mouse needs an always running Electron app. And the app suspends itself somehow everytime my computer is locked or the screen sleeps. This leads to a 30 second wait while it awakens when I get back. Now if every device and app is built on Electron with such minimal effort then I'm not sure even resurrecting Moore's Law could keep up.
  - chestnuttrees 5y ago
    I mean yeah you buy bad products and they’ll be bad… They’d manage to fuck that up in native land as well. Seems orthogonal.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Getting harder to buy products that don't suffer from these kinds of problems as Electron enables producers to cheap out on software development at the cost of user time and energy.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Ah so 2008. Was not caused by rampant fraud in banking, its just that many people bought bad products. In fact that explains away any injustice that ever happened!
  - paxys 5y ago
    So you bought and are using a mouse that takes 30 seconds to wake up from sleep, and are using that as the justification for why Electron is bad?
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      The point is not one anecdote alone. It's the trend my example highlights. IME it's hard to buy a feature rich device without needing to run more and more electron apps. Or have a tech job without such apps. This cannot scale to everything even if physics weren't standing in the way of significant die shrinks. EDIT: Forgot to mention that if I configure the device to do 'hardware' assignment then it's not as bad a problem. (Yet at the cost of some flexibility.) So it suggests that the software level bindings are being loaded through this Electron abomination.
      - paxys 5y ago
        I don’t see how you can call it a “trend” when I can’t think of a single mainstream device with such a requirement.
porknubbins 5y ago
Using Visual Studio as a native app felt quick, as if could really believe the metaphor that I was interacting with a predictable mechanical device that worked the same every time. VS Code I am constantly aware that I am interacting with a bunch of layers of sofware, like it might take 1 second or 10 seconds to do something.
- Arainach 5y ago
  Really? VS Code has been the best example of what Electron could be that I've seen. In practice it's just as responsive as Sublime Text 3 for files under 25MB.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - musicale 5y ago
    VS Code is indeed one of the best Electron apps. And it's also unpleasantly clunky and heavyweight, with unpredictable unresponsiveness as GP notes.
    - emerged 5y ago
      It’s been my daily IDE for a couple years and the only time it felt clunky or overweight is when I had installed a misbehaving extension. I remember feeling as you described, but after removing the bad extension it became snappy again. I think they actually have a tool for discovering which extension is the bottleneck?
      - hansvm 5y ago
        Even something as basic as code search is nightmarishly slow. I frequently resort to CLI tools when VSCode doesn't respond quickly enough. Thankfully it usually handles cancellation requests well so that I don't have to continue waiting for whatever god-forsaken process is running after I've already found my answer via other means, but I'm not going to pretend it isn't slow.
elcomet 5y ago
Computers are still fast when they need to be fast (data processing or other stuff). But you don't need any note taking or food ordering app to be lightning fast so why care ?
- wtetzner 5y ago
  Why should my note taking app or food ordering app be consuming resources that more important apps could be using?
rektide 5y ago
> This means that software development is a failing discipline. All we can do is to come up with ever more ridiculous layers of complexity on top of mindboggling complexity, recursively. All of this is totally self-inflicted. The problem domains that our software needs to deal with are complex enough. But we keep piling on shit of our own making. Awwhhh why so glum? This sounds so alarmed, so fraught & bleak! I don't see anyone as having a bead yet on what the final destination is, on what is right or perfect. I see change & innovation & exploration as necessary, ongoing, and this layering of platforms atop each other is part of that larger bigger quest for us all to learn what serves ourselves well, to figure out how we align. Overall these Adapter layers are quite performant, quite fast, and they isolate rather than leak complexity quite effectively. Electron's doesn't have to invent a ton of stuff to create this pleasant, familiar environment for developers or users- the operating system is simply not that relevant, is easily adapted, by a pretty boring regular programming language (Node.JS) and the world's most popular multimedia page/resource system (the browser). Right now, yes, we have the web platform as a layer above native in many cases, but I'm not sure that that is so alarming. Maybe it's transitional? The early smartphones were both enormously web first, decided to use something great rather than reinvent: the Palm Pre and original iPhone (which was webapps only). In modern times, there's ChromeOS, and Palm's webOS continues under new stewartship, mainly on TVs. If the complaint is layers of complexity, maybe we just need to get rid of proprietary & legacy platforms, & embrace the common, shared medium that all computing has. Or find new unifying better platforms! In general, I see these new platforms as being extremely liberating, as helping reduce the complexity developers have to mess with, by offering a set of well-defined standards & well known constraints & behaviors. Rather than a complicated, particular OS tied to some specific devices, with it's own quirks, with ever evolving platform capabilities & changing toolchain > If this is what software development has become, then there's no way it won't end in total and utter disaster when people start to recognize the already all too common piss poor products that barely manage to do the absolute minimum and rebel against them. It may not be marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation who'll be lined up against the wall first, but software developers when the revolution comes. Again I think moderation is good council here, but I also agree in principle that there is some awareness software can be a bit of a disaster, and it's visible that sometimes updates & "improvements" serve external interests not the users. Where I differ is I see Electron as a fairly hopeful, possible open future for computing, that does embrace users, more so than most software. Most software is not malleable, not adaptable. Electron, on the other hand, offers the very slick, open ended DevTools Protocol for most every app, which allows users control & automation & expansion of software. We can write some userscript & change the behavior of webplatform & electron systems, which is hugely powerful, is a far fairer shake & far more liberty than most computing platforms, where apps are usually compiled down, fixed in form & nature. This second paragraph really brings me back to where we started: I don't think we have a bead yet, as a larger world. It feels like there's so much discovery, so much understanding to develop. What makes me hopeful is groups like https://wicg.io https://wicg.io , which try to understand & consider how we might do better, which work to build open standards for the internet, for our shared multimedia platform, as a community, securely. There's so much further for all computing to go, so much we need to do to better serve users. I don't see anyone has having a strong lock on that, it feels like there's more to learn & become than there is that we've locked down, by far, so I am hopeful & excited & happy to see us staying malleable, working to unblock innovation at all levels, in all computing. Electron is a great & positive force here, albiet I look forward to other projects listed in the comments such as Tau providing similar-ideas with slightly-different execution.
ctvo 5y ago
> This means that software development is a failing discipline. Nah. It means many projects don't have strict performance requirements. Mediocre performance, high impact on battery life, slower startup times are OK for these folks. In return they gain cross platform support, quicker development cycles, etc.. There's nothing wrong with making these tradeoffs.
- wtetzner 5y ago
  > There's nothing wrong with making these tradeoffs. I would argue there's something wrong with giving customers a shitty experience.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
One thing I learnt when programming long time ago was that having an abstraction for things fundamentally different wasn't a good idea. I was looking for an abstraction that would make tcp and udp look the same, but I wanted the benefit of udp on udp and tcp on tcp. If you think about ui in OSes, they are different, quite a bit. Still similar in some way, but different. Given that, one solution when you have similar things that are actually different (e. g. PS3 and PS5 are both consoles that run videogames, from the same company, but are incompatible),is to ship a vm. Make things run there and use it. Chromium is that VM.

cyanydeez 5y ago

Yawn. What's important to the majority of computing tasks is boring, doesn't need super computer sppeds or IoT sized products This lament is really narrow sighted. Resources are cheap for the majority

wtetzner 5y ago
> Resources are cheap for the majority Sure, if you're OK with running only one or two applications at a time. Also, if applications were written with care toward performance/resources, imagine how much more those applications could do?
paulryanrogers 5y ago
This doesn't scale though. My mouse needs an always running Electron app. And the app suspends itself somehow everytime my computer is locked or the screen sleeps. This leads to a 30 second wait while it awakens when I get back. Now if every device and app is built on Electron with such minimal effort then I'm not sure even resurrecting Moore's Law could keep up.
- chestnuttrees 5y ago
  I mean yeah you buy bad products and they’ll be bad… They’d manage to fuck that up in native land as well. Seems orthogonal.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Getting harder to buy products that don't suffer from these kinds of problems as Electron enables producers to cheap out on software development at the cost of user time and energy.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Ah so 2008. Was not caused by rampant fraud in banking, its just that many people bought bad products. In fact that explains away any injustice that ever happened!
- paxys 5y ago
  So you bought and are using a mouse that takes 30 seconds to wake up from sleep, and are using that as the justification for why Electron is bad?
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    The point is not one anecdote alone. It's the trend my example highlights. IME it's hard to buy a feature rich device without needing to run more and more electron apps. Or have a tech job without such apps. This cannot scale to everything even if physics weren't standing in the way of significant die shrinks. EDIT: Forgot to mention that if I configure the device to do 'hardware' assignment then it's not as bad a problem. (Yet at the cost of some flexibility.) So it suggests that the software level bindings are being loaded through this Electron abomination.
    - paxys 5y ago
      I don’t see how you can call it a “trend” when I can’t think of a single mainstream device with such a requirement.

porknubbins 5y ago

Using Visual Studio as a native app felt quick, as if could really believe the metaphor that I was interacting with a predictable mechanical device that worked the same every time. VS Code I am constantly aware that I am interacting with a bunch of layers of sofware, like it might take 1 second or 10 seconds to do something.

Arainach 5y ago
Really? VS Code has been the best example of what Electron could be that I've seen. In practice it's just as responsive as Sublime Text 3 for files under 25MB.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- musicale 5y ago
  VS Code is indeed one of the best Electron apps. And it's also unpleasantly clunky and heavyweight, with unpredictable unresponsiveness as GP notes.
  - emerged 5y ago
    It’s been my daily IDE for a couple years and the only time it felt clunky or overweight is when I had installed a misbehaving extension. I remember feeling as you described, but after removing the bad extension it became snappy again. I think they actually have a tool for discovering which extension is the bottleneck?
    - hansvm 5y ago
      Even something as basic as code search is nightmarishly slow. I frequently resort to CLI tools when VSCode doesn't respond quickly enough. Thankfully it usually handles cancellation requests well so that I don't have to continue waiting for whatever god-forsaken process is running after I've already found my answer via other means, but I'm not going to pretend it isn't slow.

elcomet 5y ago

Computers are still fast when they need to be fast (data processing or other stuff). But you don't need any note taking or food ordering app to be lightning fast so why care ?

wtetzner 5y ago
Why should my note taking app or food ordering app be consuming resources that more important apps could be using?

rektide 5y ago

> This means that software development is a failing discipline. All we can do is to come up with ever more ridiculous layers of complexity on top of mindboggling complexity, recursively. All of this is totally self-inflicted. The problem domains that our software needs to deal with are complex enough. But we keep piling on shit of our own making. Awwhhh why so glum? This sounds so alarmed, so fraught & bleak! I don't see anyone as having a bead yet on what the final destination is, on what is right or perfect. I see change & innovation & exploration as necessary, ongoing, and this layering of platforms atop each other is part of that larger bigger quest for us all to learn what serves ourselves well, to figure out how we align. Overall these Adapter layers are quite performant, quite fast, and they isolate rather than leak complexity quite effectively. Electron's doesn't have to invent a ton of stuff to create this pleasant, familiar environment for developers or users- the operating system is simply not that relevant, is easily adapted, by a pretty boring regular programming language (Node.JS) and the world's most popular multimedia page/resource system (the browser). Right now, yes, we have the web platform as a layer above native in many cases, but I'm not sure that that is so alarming. Maybe it's transitional? The early smartphones were both enormously web first, decided to use something great rather than reinvent: the Palm Pre and original iPhone (which was webapps only). In modern times, there's ChromeOS, and Palm's webOS continues under new stewartship, mainly on TVs. If the complaint is layers of complexity, maybe we just need to get rid of proprietary & legacy platforms, & embrace the common, shared medium that all computing has. Or find new unifying better platforms! In general, I see these new platforms as being extremely liberating, as helping reduce the complexity developers have to mess with, by offering a set of well-defined standards & well known constraints & behaviors. Rather than a complicated, particular OS tied to some specific devices, with it's own quirks, with ever evolving platform capabilities & changing toolchain > If this is what software development has become, then there's no way it won't end in total and utter disaster when people start to recognize the already all too common piss poor products that barely manage to do the absolute minimum and rebel against them. It may not be marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation who'll be lined up against the wall first, but software developers when the revolution comes. Again I think moderation is good council here, but I also agree in principle that there is some awareness software can be a bit of a disaster, and it's visible that sometimes updates & "improvements" serve external interests not the users. Where I differ is I see Electron as a fairly hopeful, possible open future for computing, that does embrace users, more so than most software. Most software is not malleable, not adaptable. Electron, on the other hand, offers the very slick, open ended DevTools Protocol for most every app, which allows users control & automation & expansion of software. We can write some userscript & change the behavior of webplatform & electron systems, which is hugely powerful, is a far fairer shake & far more liberty than most computing platforms, where apps are usually compiled down, fixed in form & nature. This second paragraph really brings me back to where we started: I don't think we have a bead yet, as a larger world. It feels like there's so much discovery, so much understanding to develop. What makes me hopeful is groups like https://wicg.io https://wicg.io , which try to understand & consider how we might do better, which work to build open standards for the internet, for our shared multimedia platform, as a community, securely. There's so much further for all computing to go, so much we need to do to better serve users. I don't see anyone has having a strong lock on that, it feels like there's more to learn & become than there is that we've locked down, by far, so I am hopeful & excited & happy to see us staying malleable, working to unblock innovation at all levels, in all computing. Electron is a great & positive force here, albiet I look forward to other projects listed in the comments such as Tau providing similar-ideas with slightly-different execution.

ctvo 5y ago

> This means that software development is a failing discipline. Nah. It means many projects don't have strict performance requirements. Mediocre performance, high impact on battery life, slower startup times are OK for these folks. In return they gain cross platform support, quicker development cycles, etc.. There's nothing wrong with making these tradeoffs.

wtetzner 5y ago
> There's nothing wrong with making these tradeoffs. I would argue there's something wrong with giving customers a shitty experience.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago

One thing I learnt when programming long time ago was that having an abstraction for things fundamentally different wasn't a good idea. I was looking for an abstraction that would make tcp and udp look the same, but I wanted the benefit of udp on udp and tcp on tcp. If you think about ui in OSes, they are different, quite a bit. Still similar in some way, but different. Given that, one solution when you have similar things that are actually different (e. g. PS3 and PS5 are both consoles that run videogames, from the same company, but are incompatible),is to ship a vm. Make things run there and use it. Chromium is that VM.