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As a former desktop developer, the reason is obvious to me. You have to be insane to deliberately choose a career as a specific platform desktop developer nowad

by hkpack 4y ago

As a former desktop developer, the reason is obvious to me. You have to be insane to deliberately choose a career as a specific platform desktop developer nowadays. Native desktop apps are: 1. much harder to develop 2. they are way more limiting in terms how things should be done 3. are implemented completely different on each platform. It will take years to become proficient app developer on a single platform. And compare that to Electron: - you instantly have access to a huge, very dynamic community with tons of documentation. - web standards are battle tested and improve every year - your knowledge does not invalidate when developing for different platform (or when your UI framework just gets randomly abandoned: I'm looking at you Microsoft) - a lot of pain points solved much better for web that for standard UI libraries - you can apply your knowledge to web front-end development as well

auggierose 4y ago
Enough said. Of course. Everybody with half a brain understands that. I switched from Swift to TypeScript because of that for over a year now. There are things about Swift I love, and things about TypeScript/JavaScript I don't, but I can invest into bending TypeScript/JavaScript to my needs, and I can use it everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Also, I freaking love VSCode. Took a while, at first I didn't see it, but after coding TypeScript with it for a year, and now having developed my first extension for VSCode, I must say, this software is a gem. And so much simpler and cleaner than bloated monsters like IntelliJ.
labrador 4y ago
> I'm looking at you Microsoft I'm tempted to question the intelligence of Microsoft managers when I look at their desktop GUI strategy over the last 20 years
Fraterkes 4y ago
Dumb question maybe, but cant you "just" use something like sdl2?
- rzzzt 4y ago
  You can, but the nice widgets don't materialize out of thin air, nor will they gain the accessibility support that a browser or an operating system provides.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  SDL doesn't really give you a GUI like having a flour doesn't give you a cake. A great place to build off of but by the time you make a GUI out of it you're back to the above list. Realistically you'd probably be better off just starting with a full cross platform GUI framework like Qt but that doesn't make things necessarily easier it just means you can focus on making your app work instead of making a GUI framework for your app so it can work.
tabtab 4y ago
> [native] much harder to develop Balderdash! Tools like Delphi/Lazarus, Visual Basic, Clarion, PowerBuilder made it snap. Sure, they may not be "enterprise" or for writing word processors, but for everyday CRUD they are far simpler than typical web stacks. I lived it and did it. Everyone thinks tools that don't scale (team size or performance) should be dumped, but doing things well at the smaller end is a good thing. One size rarely fits all well. > are implemented completely different on each platform. Lazarus can do Windows, Mac, and Linux. But I'd really like to see a state-ful GUI markup standard so apps could send text (HTTP) gui commands/XML instead of tie them to binary libraries. > they are way more limiting in terms how things should be done "Should be"? Biz wants practical over time-drain-idealistic. Too much should-be is a YAGNI violation. > web standards are battle tested and improve every year Any commonly used standard has that benefit. And web standards are a poor fit for GUI/desktop/CRUD. You'd have to break backward compatibility to solve that because DOM is inherently flawed for that need.

by hkpack 4y ago

auggierose 4y ago

Enough said. Of course. Everybody with half a brain understands that. I switched from Swift to TypeScript because of that for over a year now. There are things about Swift I love, and things about TypeScript/JavaScript I don't, but I can invest into bending TypeScript/JavaScript to my needs, and I can use it everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Also, I freaking love VSCode. Took a while, at first I didn't see it, but after coding TypeScript with it for a year, and now having developed my first extension for VSCode, I must say, this software is a gem. And so much simpler and cleaner than bloated monsters like IntelliJ.

labrador 4y ago

> I'm looking at you Microsoft I'm tempted to question the intelligence of Microsoft managers when I look at their desktop GUI strategy over the last 20 years

Fraterkes 4y ago

Dumb question maybe, but cant you "just" use something like sdl2?

rzzzt 4y ago
You can, but the nice widgets don't materialize out of thin air, nor will they gain the accessibility support that a browser or an operating system provides.
zamadatix 4y ago
SDL doesn't really give you a GUI like having a flour doesn't give you a cake. A great place to build off of but by the time you make a GUI out of it you're back to the above list. Realistically you'd probably be better off just starting with a full cross platform GUI framework like Qt but that doesn't make things necessarily easier it just means you can focus on making your app work instead of making a GUI framework for your app so it can work.

tabtab 4y ago

> [native] much harder to develop Balderdash! Tools like Delphi/Lazarus, Visual Basic, Clarion, PowerBuilder made it snap. Sure, they may not be "enterprise" or for writing word processors, but for everyday CRUD they are far simpler than typical web stacks. I lived it and did it. Everyone thinks tools that don't scale (team size or performance) should be dumped, but doing things well at the smaller end is a good thing. One size rarely fits all well. > are implemented completely different on each platform. Lazarus can do Windows, Mac, and Linux. But I'd really like to see a state-ful GUI markup standard so apps could send text (HTTP) gui commands/XML instead of tie them to binary libraries. > they are way more limiting in terms how things should be done "Should be"? Biz wants practical over time-drain-idealistic. Too much should-be is a YAGNI violation. > web standards are battle tested and improve every year Any commonly used standard has that benefit. And web standards are a poor fit for GUI/desktop/CRUD. You'd have to break backward compatibility to solve that because DOM is inherently flawed for that need.