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These are all the views of someone who is hopelessly naive. Maybe some truth, but ignorant of where we came from and how we got here. This is a diseased view, i
by VyseofArcadia 2y ago
These are all the views of someone who is hopelessly naive. Maybe some truth, but ignorant of where we came from and how we got here. This is a diseased view, is reprehensible, small minded, and aggressively mean, and it's absurd given how much complexity has been poured into making computers do simple things in the most complex way possible.
My man, I am not a fossil. I came of age with web apps. But I am someone who has seen both sides. I have worked professionally on both desktop applications and as a full stack web developer, and my informed takeaway is web apps are insane. Web dev is a nightmarish tower of complexity that is antithetical to good engineering practice, and you should only do it if you are working in a problem space that is well and truly web-native.
I try to live by KISS, and nontrivial web apps are not simple. A couple of things to consider:
1. If it is possible to do the same task with a local application, why should I instead do that task with a web app that does everything in a distributed fashion? Unnecessary distributed computing is insane.
2. If it is possible to do the same task with a local application, and as a single application, not client-server, why should I accept the overhead of running it in a browser? Browsers are massive, complex, and resource hungry. Sure, I'll just run my application inside another complex application inside a complex OS. What's another layer? But actually, raw JS, HTML, and CSS are too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with React. But actually, React is also too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with Next.js. That's right, we've got frameworks inside of frameworks now. So that's OS -> GUI library -> browser -> framework -> framework framework -> application.
3. The world desperately needs to reduce its energy consumption to reduce the impact of climate change. If we can make more applications local and turn off a few servers, we should.
I am not an old man yelling at the cloud. I am a software engineer who cares deeply about efficient, reliable software, and I am begging, pleading for people to step back for a second and consider whether a simpler mode of application development is sufficient for their needs.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago> Browsers are massive, complex, and resource hungry. Sure, I'll just run my application inside another complex application inside a complex OS. What's another layer? But actually, raw JS, HTML, and CSS are too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with React. That's just your opinion, and you're overgeneralizing one framework as the only way. A 2009 mobile phone did pretty damned awesome with the web. The web is quite fast if you use it well. Sites like GitHub and YouTube use web components & can be extremely fast & featureful. Folks complain about layers of web tech but what's available out of box is incredible. And it's a strength not a weakness that there are many many ways to do webdev, that we have good options & keep refining or making new attempts. The web keeps enduring, having strong fundamentals that allow iteration & exploration. The Extensible Web Manifesto is alive and well, is the cornerstone supporting many different keystone styles of development. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto It's just your opinion again and again that the web so bad and ke, all without evidence. It's dirty shitty heresay. Native OSes are massive, complex, and resource hungry and better replaced by the universal hypermedia. We should get rid of the extra layers of non-web that don't help, that are complex and bloated.