[rufb]

This reminds me of Shoes. Of course, Javascript isn't designed for simplicity like Ruby, and Electron is aimed at serious product development rather than novice and weekend programmers. The product design just isn't "there" yet if we are to measure it by _why's standards. But it's nice to see an ACCESSIBLE actively-maintained tool for making cross-OS apps that "just work" again.

In fact, _why released Shoes around 2007 and disappeared in 2009. To put this in perspective, Google Chrome and the 1st iPhone were released in 2008. The web standard mess (JS in particular) was only beginning to be untangled back in 2007. Maybe today's _why would have preferred to try and make Javascript more approachable rather than choose a simple language like Ruby and make it more powerful. I don't know.

At any rate, the trend for things like Electron is to become increasingly complicated to the point where it merits a mention in developers' CVs — as it happened with Rails and Node and countless other frameworks before. Hopefully at this point there are players with stakes high enough at making things accessible to push for an entry-level version of Electron. Maybe Codecademy or one of its cousins.