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Was just discussing this with a younger colleague this past week. I think the conclusion we came to is that: a) GUI programming (for the web) is hard because t

by bane 3y ago

Was just discussing this with a younger colleague this past week. I think the conclusion we came to is that: a) GUI programming (for the web) is hard because the core technical stack that's made up of browsers, html, js, and css is abhorrent garbage (I'll get to what I'm comparing it to in a sec). It has incomprehensible standards and almost no compliant implementation that can make it all work together -- after decades, untold millions/billions of dollars, and unbelievable quantities of person-hours. b) the layer right above that (the frameworks and libraries) changes so often, are so buggy and fragile, and reinvent the same stuff over and over and over again, and a billion frameworks that all poorly do the same crap in slightly different ways get released every month -- usually built by bored engineering teams with nothing else to do or people who didn't exist in the "before times". c) My first job out of college in the "before times" was building Windows desktop software. With no real internet resources, a couple of books and whatever Microsoft called their C++ visual dev environment software back then I managed to build professional GUI software in a couple months that still runs, looks, and works exactly like it did back then and made out company quite a bit of money. Later on I applied basically the same ideas to some Linux desktop software using Qt and everything worked fine and was easy. Visual Basic, Delphi, heck even Microsoft Access demonstrated that it's so easy that even relatively inexpert people can create complex and reasonably attractive GUIs. Point is, we had the technology, it wasn't hard to use, and it worked pretty much flawlessly and the web is such a broken disaster of a mess that it's almost rewritten the brains of the entire industry to just Stockholm syndrome themselves into accepting that there must be something hard about GUIs.

andrei_says_ 3y ago
I use css and I think it’s pretty amazing. It requires understanding and thinking that goes along, not against the technology. It is hard to abstract and tailwindcss for example is an abstraction which goes against it for the sake of bypassing the deeper understanding. But css is powerful, elegant, and keeps moving in the right direction.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
There's a reason every single company wants to just build web apps and electron apps, because it's actually the best and simplest platform for delivering a cross platform UI experience that exists and it's not really that complicated at all and frankly it's unequivocally untrue that if we sampled all of the GUI software built on Visual Basic and Qt in the 90s and 2000s vs the software today that we would find it better.
- zaSmilingIdiot 3y ago
  > There's a reason every single company wants to just build web apps and electron apps, because it's actually the best and simplest platform for delivering a cross platform UI [...] Maybe, but consider that possibly the reason why many companies go that route is more to do with financial incentives: it provides for the cheapest option (both in terms of resource costs and time), while still retaining complete control over the use of the software (and consequently their revenue generation). Even ignoring the latter aspect of that, its cheaper to have 1 team build out a single interface than multiple teams each working on platform specific interfaces. Then theres a follow-on reduction in support (and troubleshooting) costs in dealing with platform specific updates, less coordination/communication needed and thus reduced need for management level resources, etc etc. Theres also lower costs in terms of skills the company is hiring. I'd also extend that to the possibility that the prevalance of tooling such as electron and its kin is a response to a demand for it, rather than arising out of being "best in class". So best and/or simplest platform... well that depends on whats being measured. From a financial perspective, sure, why not. Other measures though... Im not so sure.
  - tripleo1 3y ago
    > ... web apps and electron apps Can you now consider NOT Flutter with respect to the above? Also, remember Titanium SDK? thx
    - zaSmilingIdiot 3y ago
      Is Flutter as ubiquitous as html/css/js? Is it similarly cross platform? I responded to the suggestion that every company was choosing electron (html/css/js) because it was the best and easiest, by pointing out that the reason it might be picked may not have anything to do with simplicity or being the best choice, but rather based on other factors (like financial motivations). Flutter is a different toolkit, and isnt the typical "web page" type building of application UI, and so was outside of the scope of my original response. I've never used Titanium, but have used similar types of toolkits... all of them, regardless of whether they compile to native apps or not, are (very broadly) generally selected based on the criteria mentioned in my previous comment: why build out different platform native apps when you can largely get by with a web dev(s) building a single app that compiles to the native system? Theres tradeoffs involved, and the typical optimisation in an org is to favour lower cost and/or quicker market time. Theres the "we can do it better later when we have the money to" mentality, except once a system gains enough traction, that perspective changes to "why spend time and budget on changing something thats working". The term "working" though, is subjective... its "working" for the org, but is it truly "working" for the user that is interacting with it?
rramadass 3y ago
Amen, Brother! I too did Windows desktop software with good GUIs using nothing more than MS Visual C++/MFC/ATL and David Kruglinski/Charles Petzold's books (no Internet). There was a learning curve but not too difficult. Later on i moved onto Networking and learnt client/server distributed programming. But when i see what is going on in the Web GUI space i am truly lost. It all seems to be duct-tape and junk. A simple document sharing protocol has been munged to do anything/everything, an ad-hoc language (i.e. JS) has become de-facto GUI language and every kludge under the sun has been employed in the service of event-driven programming just to make something work. This is not Engineering but the very worst of Hacking in the full pejorative sense of the word.

by bane 3y ago

andrei_says_ 3y ago

I use css and I think it’s pretty amazing. It requires understanding and thinking that goes along, not against the technology. It is hard to abstract and tailwindcss for example is an abstraction which goes against it for the sake of bypassing the deeper understanding. But css is powerful, elegant, and keeps moving in the right direction.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

There's a reason every single company wants to just build web apps and electron apps, because it's actually the best and simplest platform for delivering a cross platform UI experience that exists and it's not really that complicated at all and frankly it's unequivocally untrue that if we sampled all of the GUI software built on Visual Basic and Qt in the 90s and 2000s vs the software today that we would find it better.

zaSmilingIdiot 3y ago
> There's a reason every single company wants to just build web apps and electron apps, because it's actually the best and simplest platform for delivering a cross platform UI [...] Maybe, but consider that possibly the reason why many companies go that route is more to do with financial incentives: it provides for the cheapest option (both in terms of resource costs and time), while still retaining complete control over the use of the software (and consequently their revenue generation). Even ignoring the latter aspect of that, its cheaper to have 1 team build out a single interface than multiple teams each working on platform specific interfaces. Then theres a follow-on reduction in support (and troubleshooting) costs in dealing with platform specific updates, less coordination/communication needed and thus reduced need for management level resources, etc etc. Theres also lower costs in terms of skills the company is hiring. I'd also extend that to the possibility that the prevalance of tooling such as electron and its kin is a response to a demand for it, rather than arising out of being "best in class". So best and/or simplest platform... well that depends on whats being measured. From a financial perspective, sure, why not. Other measures though... Im not so sure.
- tripleo1 3y ago
  > ... web apps and electron apps Can you now consider NOT Flutter with respect to the above? Also, remember Titanium SDK? thx
  - zaSmilingIdiot 3y ago
    Is Flutter as ubiquitous as html/css/js? Is it similarly cross platform? I responded to the suggestion that every company was choosing electron (html/css/js) because it was the best and easiest, by pointing out that the reason it might be picked may not have anything to do with simplicity or being the best choice, but rather based on other factors (like financial motivations). Flutter is a different toolkit, and isnt the typical "web page" type building of application UI, and so was outside of the scope of my original response. I've never used Titanium, but have used similar types of toolkits... all of them, regardless of whether they compile to native apps or not, are (very broadly) generally selected based on the criteria mentioned in my previous comment: why build out different platform native apps when you can largely get by with a web dev(s) building a single app that compiles to the native system? Theres tradeoffs involved, and the typical optimisation in an org is to favour lower cost and/or quicker market time. Theres the "we can do it better later when we have the money to" mentality, except once a system gains enough traction, that perspective changes to "why spend time and budget on changing something thats working". The term "working" though, is subjective... its "working" for the org, but is it truly "working" for the user that is interacting with it?

rramadass 3y ago

Amen, Brother! I too did Windows desktop software with good GUIs using nothing more than MS Visual C++/MFC/ATL and David Kruglinski/Charles Petzold's books (no Internet). There was a learning curve but not too difficult. Later on i moved onto Networking and learnt client/server distributed programming. But when i see what is going on in the Web GUI space i am truly lost. It all seems to be duct-tape and junk. A simple document sharing protocol has been munged to do anything/everything, an ad-hoc language (i.e. JS) has become de-facto GUI language and every kludge under the sun has been employed in the service of event-driven programming just to make something work. This is not Engineering but the very worst of Hacking in the full pejorative sense of the word.