7 ms·

Are you saying that VB6 as a platform is superior to the web in its current state, all things considered? The comparison is silly, there is no competition in te

Are you saying that VB6 as a platform is superior to the web in its current state, all things considered? The comparison is silly, there is no competition in terms of distribution, portability, flexibility. Can you not see how it is remarkable that web development tools can rival desktop GUI environments, given that by design, everything on the web is running in a very limited sandbox, one based largely on the work of slow-moving standards bodies?

catnaroek 13y ago
I have yet to see any widely used Web development tool that facilitates local reasoning: looking at a piece of code and knowing what it can or cannot do, without having to look at the rest of the program/page/stylesheet/whatever.
- fizx 13y ago
  Web components/shadow DOM may help sooner or later. http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-components-intro-20130606/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-components-intro-20130606/
  - RWeaver 13y ago
    And Angular directives are pretty self contained, with their own scope, template, functions, etc. You need angular.js obviously, but that's just the generic library.
lelandbatey 13y ago
Yeah, you're right, that is cool and that is remarkable. But Javascript still really sucks sometimes. To use an analogy: I'm not saying the plane doesn't fly, but I am saying the plane seats are uncomfortable. Also, this is a total aside: what if there actually was a way to stuff like C++ on a computer in sandboxed environment that could be loaded automatically by a user in a seamless way? If that happened, if you took away Javascripts monopoly of the highly portable and convenient environment, it'd be dropped so fast you could blink and miss it.
- saurik 13y ago
  PNaCl
  - lelandbatey 13y ago
    Which is awesome to actually use, but it doesn't have the interoperability that Javascript does. Maybe one day it will, and that'll be awesome. But till then, we'll never know.
    - mistercow 13y ago
      I wonder if it would be possible to shim PNaCl with emscripten as a fallback.
- pcwalton 13y ago
  > Also, this is a total aside: what if there actually was a way to stuff like C++ on a computer in sandboxed environment that could be loaded automatically by a user in a seamless way? If that happened, if you took away Javascripts monopoly of the highly portable and convenient environment, it'd be dropped so fast you could blink and miss it. This is what asm.js enables for non-garbage-collected languages, and what Binary Data enables for garbage-collected languages. But I think you're overestimating how much people want to move away from JavaScript. The overwhelming majority of Web pages never leave the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox, because they just aren't bound on JS execution speed. What is far more important than raw JS speed on most Web pages is ease of development and DOM/CSS performance. I think it'd be hard for C++ to gain much mindshare on the long tail of Web sites, even in a world where asm.js was universal, easy to use, and 100% of native speed. JS has plenty of faults, but one thing it's never lacked is convenience. Conversely, C++ has many virtues, but one thing it's never had is ease of use. Given that calculus, I expect JS to continue to dominate for a long time.
  - catnaroek 13y ago
    > JS has plenty of faults, but one thing it's never lacked is convenience. Conversely, C++ has many virtues, but one thing it's never had is ease of use. That is a weird thing to say. Maybe it is just me, but when I use JavaScript, I cannot stop worrying about the possibility that there is yet another corner case I have not contemplated. Admittely, C++ is full of corner cases too; but, in my experience, it can be coerced into being a more or less civilized language by making a list of strictly verboten constructs, including, but not limited to, void pointers, manual resource ownership management and casts other than static_cast. When you leave these out, you actually have a smaller language that is easier to reason about. With JavaScript, no list of bad constructs can do - you need to actively rely on the semantically crazy stuff to do anything useful.
wslh 13y ago
Surely it remains easier to develop with VB6 than with Javascript. I am talking mainly from the IDE perspective. One of the core technologies behind VB6 (COM) remains widely used in Microsoft Windows today.
- solomatov 13y ago
  Try JetBrains, WebStorm, it's a great IDE for JavaScript. It's much more handy than VB6's IDE.
  - wslh 13y ago
    I love JetBrains products but... where is the drag & drop functionality to build Web UIs? VB6 was released on 1998!
PommeDeTerre 13y ago
Even today, web apps do not rival the desktop apps of a decade or two ago. Yes, there has been some advancement, but web apps are still inferior in every respect. The performance of web apps is much worse than that of desktop apps, for example. Complex desktop apps written in C, VB, and PowerBuilder ran just fine on 486 or early Pentium systems that have a very small fraction of the processing power and resources of a modern system. Yet it's still common to see web apps in general perform quite poorly on these modern systems, while doing less than the mid-1990s apps did. Developers at least have some choices when it comes to desktop apps. They can use a multitude of different languages, along with a variety of different libraries and frameworks. This is a much richer ecosystem than what we get with web development today, where you're basically stuck with JavaScript, or a language that's nothing more than a slight veneer over JavaScript (CoffeeScript, TypeScript, and even Dart). Don't even bother mentioning asm.js or Emscripten. Asm.js is merely a rancid subset of JavaScript, and Emscripten is experimental at best. The portability argument isn't even valid. Languages like C, C++ and Python offer superb portability today, especially if used with one of the extremely cross-platform GUI toolkits available for making desktop apps. Given that almost every major JavaScript implementation today is written in C and/or C++, the portability of JavaScript is inherently no better than than of C and C++. The ability to communicate over a network isn't anything special, either. All sorts of desktop apps have been doing this for several decades now. The distribution argument also isn't valid. The package management systems offered by most Linux distributions, for example, are far nicer to work with. They make it trivial to find and install native apps, and unlike web apps, you get to choose if and when you upgrade, rather than having changes forced upon you time and time again. The sandbox argument is also irrelevant. Various mainframe and UNIX-like OSes have offered several different ways of jailing or otherwise isolating processes for many, many years now. It's nothing new. But unlike the browser, they give real control over how much access is allowed, and without imposing horrid performance loss. All of these limitations of web apps come together to make for a user experience that isn't enjoyable. At best, web apps can imitate desktop apps, usually at a quality and user experience level 10 to 15 years behind desktop apps. It's objectively incorrect to claim that web apps "rival" desktop apps, when all of the evidence shows that they clearly do not.
- oinksoft 13y ago

catnaroek 13y ago

I have yet to see any widely used Web development tool that facilitates local reasoning: looking at a piece of code and knowing what it can or cannot do, without having to look at the rest of the program/page/stylesheet/whatever.

fizx 13y ago
Web components/shadow DOM may help sooner or later. http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-components-intro-20130606/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-components-intro-20130606/
- RWeaver 13y ago
  And Angular directives are pretty self contained, with their own scope, template, functions, etc. You need angular.js obviously, but that's just the generic library.

lelandbatey 13y ago

Yeah, you're right, that is cool and that is remarkable. But Javascript still really sucks sometimes. To use an analogy: I'm not saying the plane doesn't fly, but I am saying the plane seats are uncomfortable. Also, this is a total aside: what if there actually was a way to stuff like C++ on a computer in sandboxed environment that could be loaded automatically by a user in a seamless way? If that happened, if you took away Javascripts monopoly of the highly portable and convenient environment, it'd be dropped so fast you could blink and miss it.

saurik 13y ago
PNaCl
- lelandbatey 13y ago
  Which is awesome to actually use, but it doesn't have the interoperability that Javascript does. Maybe one day it will, and that'll be awesome. But till then, we'll never know.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    I wonder if it would be possible to shim PNaCl with emscripten as a fallback.
pcwalton 13y ago
> Also, this is a total aside: what if there actually was a way to stuff like C++ on a computer in sandboxed environment that could be loaded automatically by a user in a seamless way? If that happened, if you took away Javascripts monopoly of the highly portable and convenient environment, it'd be dropped so fast you could blink and miss it. This is what asm.js enables for non-garbage-collected languages, and what Binary Data enables for garbage-collected languages. But I think you're overestimating how much people want to move away from JavaScript. The overwhelming majority of Web pages never leave the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox, because they just aren't bound on JS execution speed. What is far more important than raw JS speed on most Web pages is ease of development and DOM/CSS performance. I think it'd be hard for C++ to gain much mindshare on the long tail of Web sites, even in a world where asm.js was universal, easy to use, and 100% of native speed. JS has plenty of faults, but one thing it's never lacked is convenience. Conversely, C++ has many virtues, but one thing it's never had is ease of use. Given that calculus, I expect JS to continue to dominate for a long time.
- catnaroek 13y ago
  > JS has plenty of faults, but one thing it's never lacked is convenience. Conversely, C++ has many virtues, but one thing it's never had is ease of use. That is a weird thing to say. Maybe it is just me, but when I use JavaScript, I cannot stop worrying about the possibility that there is yet another corner case I have not contemplated. Admittely, C++ is full of corner cases too; but, in my experience, it can be coerced into being a more or less civilized language by making a list of strictly verboten constructs, including, but not limited to, void pointers, manual resource ownership management and casts other than static_cast. When you leave these out, you actually have a smaller language that is easier to reason about. With JavaScript, no list of bad constructs can do - you need to actively rely on the semantically crazy stuff to do anything useful.

wslh 13y ago

Surely it remains easier to develop with VB6 than with Javascript. I am talking mainly from the IDE perspective. One of the core technologies behind VB6 (COM) remains widely used in Microsoft Windows today.

solomatov 13y ago
Try JetBrains, WebStorm, it's a great IDE for JavaScript. It's much more handy than VB6's IDE.
- wslh 13y ago
  I love JetBrains products but... where is the drag & drop functionality to build Web UIs? VB6 was released on 1998!

PommeDeTerre 13y ago

Even today, web apps do not rival the desktop apps of a decade or two ago. Yes, there has been some advancement, but web apps are still inferior in every respect. The performance of web apps is much worse than that of desktop apps, for example. Complex desktop apps written in C, VB, and PowerBuilder ran just fine on 486 or early Pentium systems that have a very small fraction of the processing power and resources of a modern system. Yet it's still common to see web apps in general perform quite poorly on these modern systems, while doing less than the mid-1990s apps did. Developers at least have some choices when it comes to desktop apps. They can use a multitude of different languages, along with a variety of different libraries and frameworks. This is a much richer ecosystem than what we get with web development today, where you're basically stuck with JavaScript, or a language that's nothing more than a slight veneer over JavaScript (CoffeeScript, TypeScript, and even Dart). Don't even bother mentioning asm.js or Emscripten. Asm.js is merely a rancid subset of JavaScript, and Emscripten is experimental at best. The portability argument isn't even valid. Languages like C, C++ and Python offer superb portability today, especially if used with one of the extremely cross-platform GUI toolkits available for making desktop apps. Given that almost every major JavaScript implementation today is written in C and/or C++, the portability of JavaScript is inherently no better than than of C and C++. The ability to communicate over a network isn't anything special, either. All sorts of desktop apps have been doing this for several decades now. The distribution argument also isn't valid. The package management systems offered by most Linux distributions, for example, are far nicer to work with. They make it trivial to find and install native apps, and unlike web apps, you get to choose if and when you upgrade, rather than having changes forced upon you time and time again. The sandbox argument is also irrelevant. Various mainframe and UNIX-like OSes have offered several different ways of jailing or otherwise isolating processes for many, many years now. It's nothing new. But unlike the browser, they give real control over how much access is allowed, and without imposing horrid performance loss. All of these limitations of web apps come together to make for a user experience that isn't enjoyable. At best, web apps can imitate desktop apps, usually at a quality and user experience level 10 to 15 years behind desktop apps. It's objectively incorrect to claim that web apps "rival" desktop apps, when all of the evidence shows that they clearly do not.

oinksoft 13y ago