3 ms·

I’d be curious to know what has better tooling than the web? From what other platform are people coming from that they find web tooling to be a downgrade? Comi

I’d be curious to know what has better tooling than the web? From what other platform are people coming from that they find web tooling to be a downgrade? Coming from a C++ background I will happily write webpack configs for the rest of my life…

djbusby 3y ago
VB6 had amazing tooling. Unified dev environment, easy UI designer, step-debugger, press one button and your App works on all (Windows) devices from Win95 and newer!
- stavros 3y ago
  Oh man, VB6 was the pinnacle of writing desktop software. The language itself wasn't great, but the overall experience was stellar.
theptip 3y ago
Every modern backend web programming framework? Frontend requires a lot of flexibility and compromise because the runtime environment is so disparate. In the backend you choose and control one runtime so the framework can integrate tightly with the authoring workflow. Concretely, Rails, Django, Spring, Elm, all have great tooling and are much easier to work with than frontend stacks.
throwup238 3y ago
Web tooling on the browser side is amazing, but until relatively recently the build tooling was so bad I'd easily put it on par with C/C++. Not as bad mind you, since package management is better, but otherwise I'd rank both as from the same layer of hell and in the same ballpark in terms of suffering. The only thing that rose to the level of debugging webpack configs for me recently is debugging the build for a QT app that linked against non-system KDE libs. Now if you know what you're doing it's much better now that everyone has converged on ES6 modules and with the latest generation of build tools like Vite, all you need to do is npm install some packages to provide zero-config support for frameworks like React, Svelte, etc. But it used to be so much worse.

3 ms·

I’d be curious to know what has better tooling than the web? From what other platform are people coming from that they find web tooling to be a downgrade? Comi

by zarzavat 3y ago

djbusby 3y ago
VB6 had amazing tooling. Unified dev environment, easy UI designer, step-debugger, press one button and your App works on all (Windows) devices from Win95 and newer!
- stavros 3y ago
  Oh man, VB6 was the pinnacle of writing desktop software. The language itself wasn't great, but the overall experience was stellar.
theptip 3y ago
Every modern backend web programming framework? Frontend requires a lot of flexibility and compromise because the runtime environment is so disparate. In the backend you choose and control one runtime so the framework can integrate tightly with the authoring workflow. Concretely, Rails, Django, Spring, Elm, all have great tooling and are much easier to work with than frontend stacks.
throwup238 3y ago
Web tooling on the browser side is amazing, but until relatively recently the build tooling was so bad I'd easily put it on par with C/C++. Not as bad mind you, since package management is better, but otherwise I'd rank both as from the same layer of hell and in the same ballpark in terms of suffering. The only thing that rose to the level of debugging webpack configs for me recently is debugging the build for a QT app that linked against non-system KDE libs. Now if you know what you're doing it's much better now that everyone has converged on ES6 modules and with the latest generation of build tools like Vite, all you need to do is npm install some packages to provide zero-config support for frameworks like React, Svelte, etc. But it used to be so much worse.