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| ▲ | vacuity 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Grandparent is making the case that it shouldn't have this role, which is independent of it having the role. It seems contrary to "the hacker spirit" to use the is-ought fallacy to discourage innovation. Is it wrong to have a contrary, if probably doomed to fail, stance to the mainstream? But of course a contrary idea would fail if everyone seeks the mainstream instead of it. To justify sticking to the mainstream, you have to weigh its costs against the benefits of the alternative too. | |
| ▲ | datadeft 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Same could have sad on any random subject. Examples: - High-fructose corn syrup is eating the world. . You can fight it like so many people before, but you will lose like everyone else - Cancer is eating the world. You can fight it like so many people before, but you will lose like everyone else Etc. I think bad things could be replaced with better things where we have this luxury. Taking a passive stance on this is pointless and lazy. | | |
| ▲ | meiraleal 7 months ago | parent [-] | | That's because you dislike JS and think it is a problem to solve. That's a you problem. JS is no HFCS, what an absurd comparison. |
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| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You are not paying attention. WASM's ecosystem is moving slowly but surely in the direction of JS being thrown away for good. Ain't happening anytime soon -- sadly -- but especially with WIT used to specify various modules and collections of modules plus having more or less uniform function specification, the days of JS' monopoly are numbered. The writing is on the wall. There are successful WASM web apps not written in JS today. JS is being tolerated. Not adored. Frontenders are living in a bubble and don't see it. | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 7 months ago | parent [-] | | > There are successful WASM web apps not written in JS today. Such as? > JS is being tolerated. Not adored. Can you prove it? I’ve seen enough people of JS being adored. I am one of them (maybe because I use it mostly for hobby projects). | | |
| ▲ | BiteCode_dev 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | If you haven't coded serious projects in at least 5 very different languages, you likely adore one language because you just don't know better. There is such a variation between js, perl, python, rust, C#, lisp, bash, haskell, erlang and sql that the blind spot is huge. It's like eating hot dogs all your life and debating food merits with people that tasted japanese, indian and french food. | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 7 months ago | parent [-] | | I’m mixing Python, C++, Java, Kotlin and shell scripting professionally. Used to work on enterprise C# project. Experimented on a hobby level with Elixir, Haskell, OCaml, Ruby, TypeScript, JS, Dart. | | |
| ▲ | neonsunset 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm recently enjoying F# a lot. What really sold it was partial application and absolutely bonkers type inference with gradual typing. You just write code and let type system infer the signature of the functions, only specifying the types when necessary. It's so much cleaner and I'm sorely missing it in C#. It's a bit off-topic but if you liked Elixir it's kind of like Elixir but fast, and like OCaml but widely usable in production. It could also be familiar after Python due to mostly indentation-based scoping and not having to define signatures (except you go from something terrible and untyped to Hindley-Milner). | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | Python, C++, Java, Kotlin and shell scripting are all globally mutable procedural / imperative languages. Of course you'll also like JS. Spend several years with LISP, Elixir, Haskell, OCaml, then you'd be in a better position to say you keep loving JS. You are sticking to the same type of languages. This warps your point of view. | | |
| ▲ | Capricorn2481 7 months ago | parent [-] | | What an obnoxious and condescending response. They said they've used those languages. Consider that these languages have huge flaws of their own. Elixir doesn't even have a proper language server. Using niche languages does not automatically make you special on internet forums. | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Elixir has two fully functional language servers and it's very far from niche, or I've been spending imaginary money for the last 9 years. What I said still applies, the guy seems to have a familiarity bias and said nothing to show otherwise. As for being condescending, your reply seems like a textbook example. | |
| ▲ | bdangubic 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | amen. there’s people that use haskell, ocaml, lisp… and then there’s rest of us that do actual real work :) | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | Oh yeah, that's not obnoxious at all. :D Lost on your way to Reddit, I see. | | |
| ▲ | bdangubic 7 months ago | parent [-] | | you can dish it out but you can't take it, I see... :) | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | I said was that I believe the poster lacks the perspective to criticize certain languages. That was and still is the topic. You are free to interpret it any flame-bait ways. I ain't biting though. Peace. | | |
| ▲ | bdangubic 7 months ago | parent [-] | | did you actually read the post? where from his post do you get "poster lacks the perspective to criticize certain languages?" and of course even more pertinent - which languages did he even criticize other than to point out things that are not possible in Scala/Rust (certainly not a critique, each language has its pros/cons...) |
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| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Such as? I forgot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I do remember I've seen one website emulating parts of Photoshop that was made with WASM but I lost it since I have no interest in the area. You can take a look here though: https://madewithwebassembly.com/ And don't try to pick those apart one by one. Point was that WASM works and people do stuff with it. I've seen it several times and since it's not my main area of interest plus I don't get paid for it, I am not exactly keeping up to date every week. > Can you prove it? I’ve seen enough people of JS being adored. I am one of them (maybe because I use it mostly for hobby projects). Can I prove it? How would I even do that? We all have anecdotal evidence, plus I am not secretly one of the sysadmins of Stackoverflow or Reddit. People literally have no choice but to ultimately use JS when coding for the browser, and that's a fact of life. There's Typescript nowadays and I hear from frontenders that it's definitely better but they also say every now and then you have to drop to JS and this is where they start sighing. So no, I can't prove it. But the mere fact that JS is a monopoly of sorts, plus it has a huge and well-documented number of problems should incline you to believe as I do. Finally, if you allow me, you have answered your own question by saying that you use JS mostly for hobby projects. That changes things SEVERELY; you are enthusiastic about the thing you are working on and the potential idiosyncrasies of the chosen tech (in this case JS) are seen as small and only mildly annoying hurdles. And if you get tired or annoyed you can just drop the hobby project until your enthusiasm gets naturally rejuvenated. Start working with it every day and having to integrate with a lot of 3rd party libraries and other people's code and then tell me you love JS. ...And I've heard that too btw (that people work with JS every day and love it) but as a sibling comment pointed out, you likely don't have the perspective of working with other languages with very different features and tradeoffs. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | Until there are electricity bills from servers to pay. JavaScript on the server, only when I can't say no for whatever reason, like being forced to search for another job as consequence of it. Instead of rewriting JavaScript tools in Zig, Rust, Go, whatever cool compiled language of the month, use the said language directly. | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | I believe all of Zig, Rust and Go have been around for long enough to not deserve the moniker "cool compiled language of the month" though. I do agree that it's time to write frontend not in JS. It has been time for 10+ years even but oh well. | | |
| ▲ | DecoySalamander 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | On the contrary, it's time to move to JS for the UI of desktop applications as well. We've seen this approach become more and more popular with Electron over the last 10 years. | | |
| ▲ | ogoffart 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | It's also possible to use JS (or TypeScript) on the desktop, without having the need for a browser or a webview.
That's for example what we're trying to do with Slint https://slint.dev
Then you get the good part of javacript for your application logic, without the bloat and attack surface of a browser. | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you say so. Take a look at Slack and Teams and tell me that's what a performant and lagless UI feels like. ...Oh? What's that? I am hearing something faint in the distance, like... "their devs are not using JS well", maybe? Tell you what. If a technology can be held wrong, then it's a bad technology. Which, yes, encompasses most technology nowadays. You heard me. | | |
| ▲ | DecoySalamander 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | I use Discord daily and can't really call it slow and laggy, it feels adequate if anything. Can't really comment on Slack and Teams - I've obviously used both, but haven't been a heavy user of Teams and never was in a large "corporation-wide" Slack instance. I have, however, been a heavy user and developer of a Slack competitor. Not surprisingly, it had a lot of problems, but most of them stemmed from a) clumsy handling of megabytes of chat logs, b) a codebase that grew organically out of a startup project and needed a major rewrite, c) misallocation of resources (for the longest time, everything Electron-related was handled by a single developer in a satellite office). In my opinion, we would have had the same performance issues and bugs if it had been developed in any other language. We actually had some Qt apps that we deprecated and rewrote in JS as part of the main client - there was no user-noticeable performance drop, but significantly fewer crashes. | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | ...OK? It was already mentioned that people can do better apps with Electron than others. Not surprising. My objection is that the possibility to make laggy and bad apps exists. It should not exist. As for what problems a Slack competitor faces, well, I am not interested. That's the dev team's problem and not mine. I want a lagless Slack. | | |
| ▲ | DecoySalamander 7 months ago | parent [-] | | > the possibility to make laggy and bad apps exists. It should not exist I see. Then the only way forward is to stop all software development altogether and enjoy memories of apps that we used 20 years ago when we were much younger, and fantasies of apps that we could build with newly acquired wisdom, but will not. | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | Funny, still not what I said. Progress is way too slow and blindly follows local maximii. That's not OK. That's the part I am expressing displeasure with. |
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| ▲ | foldr 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | But can you point to an app that has the same UX functionality as Slack that's been successfully implemented using Qt or another native toolkit? | | |
| ▲ | rubymamis 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm building a chat app - well, a client for LLMs using Qt (QML + C++). It's highly performant with beautiful animations: https://rubymamistvalove.com/client.mp4 I also created a native block editor (like Notion's) in QML and C++: https://get-notes.com I really hope that I can show that Qt with QML is a viable alternative to the inefficient resource hogs that are Electron/web apps. | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wish I could but many people gave up and started using Electron due to employability. And we're stuck with crappy laggy UIs. I remember the MirandaIM multi-messenger from 20+ years ago very fondly... 50MB RAM usage and I was signed to 4 services, on a computer that my smartphone today can emulate 16 of, simultaneously, and it was still running faster than you can blink. Ehhhh, good times. Electron/JS is a herd just running in one direction, personified. The fact that something is popular does not imply quality, not at all. Most of the time it implies that everybody settled on it and does not want to hear otherwise for various reasons (in this case: money, as employers are never going to give you the requisite time to build stuff with Qt or others). | | |
| ▲ | foldr 7 months ago | parent [-] | | It could be that Qt would work better and no-one is using it for the sorts of reasons that you mention. But I think the more plausible explanation is that no UI library can compete with what the browser offers anymore. This would hardly be surprising. The person hours invested in HTML+CSS rendering vastly exceed those invested in Qt or any other UI lib. The kind of argument you're making would be much more convincing if there were relevant examples of Qt-based apps that provided a superior user experience to the Electron apps you're criticising. I don't personally find Electron apps laggy in general. VSCode is very responsive, for example. | | |
| ▲ | rubymamis 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Probably because you're using a very performant machine (M1-M4 are extremely capable), but other than responsiveness (which even on an M1 isn't perfect), you got 3 more issues with Electron apps: 1. High RAM usage. 2. The bloat will accelerate as more abstractions are added to web frameworks. 3. Battery usage - the most noticeable issue for me. I've yet to empirically test this, but my guess would be that Electron apps use substantially more power than native apps. I will test this theory eventually. | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah VSCode is fine, I agree. But as mentioned above, if one can screw up their Electron app to be as laggy as Slack then the tech is not good. I stand by that statement. > The kind of argument you're making would be much more convincing if there were relevant examples of Qt-based apps that provided a superior user experience to the Electron apps you're criticising. That's arguing in circles and it's the chicken-and-egg problem. Toolkits like Qt get less and less mindshare because Electron is desired and is encouraged by employers. I can't speak for Qt in particular btw, just using it as an example here, but my point is that it could be the best UI toolkit ever but since it takes a little more time to spin up an app with it then the business will want you to not use it. Hence, I can't show you those Qt apps. I feel that in these discussions people just blindly trust popularity to be an indicator of quality. I have a huge problem with that mindset and my career has seen the exact opposite, many times. Hence my comments. And if you want to take away just one thing from our discussion, it's this: please don't mistake Electron's popularity with the idea that Electron is the best UI toolkit. | | |
| ▲ | foldr 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not arguing in circles. It's just asking you for evidence that an app like Slack would be better if it were implemented in Qt or a similar library. If there is literally no example of this having been done successfully, how can you be so confident that it would work great? >Toolkits like Qt get less and less mindshare because Electron is desired and is encouraged by employers. But why is it desired? I've used Qt before (a long time ago) and know enough C++ to be dangerous. I'd still avoid using Qt simply because I already know how to make UI's in HTML+CSS. I can't say that replacing those tools with a manually-constructed C++ object graph – or with an unfamiliar markup language (QML) – strikes me as an appealing option. Most of the people carping about Electron apps on HN don't want to make a UI in Qt either! It is becoming one of these legendary magical technologies (like Lisp) that is much praised and yet too little used for its flaws to be common knowledge. | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | > If there is literally no example of this having been done successfully, how can you be so confident that it would work great? Past experiences. I've seen much smoother and faster apps more than 20 years ago. Surely they weren't using black magic. > But why is it desired? Because it is slightly quicker to start an app with it and because people want to have a web variant of it (runnable in the browser) if/when necessary. Those are actual selling points and I agree with them wholeheartedly -- I object to Electron's lagginess however. They can and they should do better. > I'd still avoid using Qt simply because I already know how to make UI's in HTML+CSS. Well yes, that's one of the factors -- people default to what they already know. But zero mention is given to the numerous problems with the DOM model of making UIs as well... a topic way too big for me to have any desire to delve in, again. Inertia. A bad thing starts being used widely because of 2-3 desirable traits, and when it gains enough critical mass nobody wants to criticize it. Well, I do. | | |
| ▲ | foldr 7 months ago | parent [-] | | >I've seen much smoother and faster apps more than 20 years ago Me too, but they didn't have all the whizzbang UI features that you get for free from a web stack. I could live without most of those, but users do expect all that stuff to work these days. | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | I am one of those users. I do my job as a programmer to the best of my ability and I am not allowing lags for as much as humanly possible (sometimes you can't do anything about a slow 3rd party API though). They should do the same. I have no sympathy for sloppy work, and Slack and Teams are in the top two spots there. | | |
| ▲ | foldr 7 months ago | parent [-] | | Sloppy work and bad code are orthogonal issues to choice of technology. There are some sloppily written Qt apps out there too. If the Slack devs are as sloppy as you say, then we ought to be thankful that they’re writing JS and not C++! Lag is something that some people care about a lot. I actually think that most users don’t notice it or care very much, up to a certain point. | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | > There are some sloppily written Qt apps out there too. I specifically asked not to focus on examples but OK, I guess you really had to get it off your chest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The topic was not "Electron vs. Qt" at all. > I actually think that most users don’t notice it or care very much, up to a certain point. Good for them, to me it's a mood and productivity killer. And no I'll not change my mind on this, ever. Broader point is: the people who worked on Electron, Slack etc. should have really done better. But I have witnessed how job security almost always leads to sloppy work. | | |
| ▲ | rubymamis 7 months ago | parent [-] | | Actually, the people who created Electron (and the code editor Atom), themselves abandoned it to create a performant code editor called Zed - with its own GUI toolkit based on Rust. | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | Case in point / point proven then. :D I didn't know they were the same. Fascinating actually, thanks for making me aware of it! |
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| ▲ | rubymamis 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | What kind of UI feature are you speaking of? I would love to see how easy it'd be to do in QML. |
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| ▲ | rubymamis 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | One obvious reason why Qt is less popular is the ability for companies to deploy web apps (non Electron, but in the browser). Many end users expect a desktop/mobile app to also be accessible using the browser. I'd argue that QML is an order of magnitude easier to develop than any other web frameworks (yes, you do have to get familiar with it, and if you made some apps before you could re-use some essential, battle-tested components). I hope to maybe share/sell some of mine some day. I'm not sure what to answer regarding the browser experience. WASM isn't really there, isn't it? I haven't had a chance to test it on my own apps yet tho. I recently had a thought that maybe that Qt Company should also target HTML/CSS/JS generation of a QML file. Another, more interesting thought would be for browsers to be able to process and render QML files natively (but that won't happen without substential market share). | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | > but that won't happen without substential market share So again: the chicken-and-egg problem. Basically, nothing is going to improve until somebody rolls up their sleeves and does all the hard work for free and do better than Electron -- or a corporation will push for it, it's always one of both. Then everybody else will flock to them. That's what I observed several times during my life and career. | | |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | English reading compreehension problem, or feeling attacked? | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | Needlessly provocative. Sounds more like you felt attacked. No reason for me to feel attacked, I pointed out that what you said doesn't make much sense in terms of how long have these languages been around. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 7 months ago | parent [-] | | On the contrary, apparently we are in a need of English lesson over here. "Instead of rewriting JavaScript tools in Zig, Rust, Go, whatever cool compiled language of the month, use the said language directly." Meaning use Zig instead of JavaScript, use Rust instead of JavaScript, use Go instead of JavaScript, use "whatever cool compiled language of the month" instead of JavaScript, or if you prefer for the last example, use "whatever compiled language takes your fancy" instead of JavaScript. Clear enough? | | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-] | | Would be clear if it did not seem to me that you are including three languages that have been around for a while in the "whatever cool compiled language of the month" group. If not -- then clear. If yes, then this is getting even more confusing. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 7 months ago | parent [-] | | It is called an enumerations of choices, 3 named ones, followed by a generalisation of whatever else might possible as option. Given that boring languages like Java, C#, OCaml, Haskell are kind behind their times for cool kids to rewrite stuff, that leaves the unamed cool programming language of the month as option, whatever that language may be. | | |
| ▲ | KPGv2 7 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Hello, friend! Professional writer here. An enumeration of three choices followed by a generalization reads like the three choices are examples of the generalization, not disjoint. | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | Honestly, you are not making this better. This comment also implicitly puts Rust and Zig in the "unnamed cool programming language of the month" group again unless I completely lost the ability to read English. And seeing that a writer commented something similar to my comments upthread, I am not very inclined to assume I can't read English. Still, your point is taken, I just can't help but think I am sensing some slight... shall we call it non-preference... towards a few programming languages. |
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