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> Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets [...] And it works. I beg to differ. When the economics of doing UIs shifted away from APIs like

> Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets [...] And it works. I beg to differ. When the economics of doing UIs shifted away from APIs like Windows Forms, Carbon, JavaFX towards the current trend of doing everything in a browser, it brought with it some serious regression in how powerful and user friendly those GUIs are. With Microsoft-level resources, you can take on a mammoth engineering task like implementing Office or Visual Studio in the browser. But if you are resource-constrained in the way that most developers are, you cut corners and drop functionality, and that's where we are today with browser GUIs ...not that any of that matters if all you're doing is CRUD, like most people are. But one shouldn't judge technology by its easiest, most boring, and degenerate use cases.

vincnetas 3y ago
I beg your pardon, but why do you consider CRUD 'degenerate'?
- stakhanov 3y ago
  A "degenerate special case" of a general concept, in mathematics [1], is a special case that no longer has the complexities that motivated the need for that concept in the first place. Consider, for example, the evolution of a CRUD app that was first written in, say, the late 80s for OS/400, using an interaction style where it's all full screen forms rendered as text that you fill out with your keyboard, then submit. Say, you rewrote that app in the 00s in Windows Forms but using the same interaction design, and then again in the 20s as a browser-based app. If you look at the evolution of what happened to UI technology through the lens of that app, you won't feel like anything is amiss in 2023, but you're also kind of missing the point of having a GUI in the first place, as opposed to, say, a text terminal. Whenever I hear "all I need is a textedit and a button" from a web developer, I kind of assume that this is what informs their viewpoint. If you instead look at the evolution of UI technology through the lens of an app like Photoshop, it will immediately be obvious to you what it is that GUIs uniquely have to offer that, for example, text terminals can't, and why rewriting such a UI in a browser is anything but trivial. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_(mathematics)
- deleted 3y ago
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vincnetas 3y ago

I beg your pardon, but why do you consider CRUD 'degenerate'?

stakhanov 3y ago
A "degenerate special case" of a general concept, in mathematics [1], is a special case that no longer has the complexities that motivated the need for that concept in the first place. Consider, for example, the evolution of a CRUD app that was first written in, say, the late 80s for OS/400, using an interaction style where it's all full screen forms rendered as text that you fill out with your keyboard, then submit. Say, you rewrote that app in the 00s in Windows Forms but using the same interaction design, and then again in the 20s as a browser-based app. If you look at the evolution of what happened to UI technology through the lens of that app, you won't feel like anything is amiss in 2023, but you're also kind of missing the point of having a GUI in the first place, as opposed to, say, a text terminal. Whenever I hear "all I need is a textedit and a button" from a web developer, I kind of assume that this is what informs their viewpoint. If you instead look at the evolution of UI technology through the lens of an app like Photoshop, it will immediately be obvious to you what it is that GUIs uniquely have to offer that, for example, text terminals can't, and why rewriting such a UI in a browser is anything but trivial. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_(mathematics)
deleted 3y ago
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