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by coroutines 3622 days ago
I used to write C but now I do Coffeescript/JS. When I was just starting in C (as a teenager) I'd get really excited to learn the GNU's C standard library. I wanted to know how to make better and better console applications and networking applications. It felt like there was a huge learning curve to using graphics toolkits. Now that I do JS I feel like Web APIs are the new "C standard library". I can make console or apps with a GUI. I can do more because there already exists a large amount of interfaces abstracted over things that would take me a while to learn. At the same time, people are always figuring out new ways to abuse existing web standards for fun and profit - like how page visibility was done before the Visibility API existed: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibi...

I like being a JS dev. It's a very fun runtime to poke around... I'd almost prefer all apps to live within the heavily sandboxed browser. It's the best effort made toward portability and it's been a community effort. :x
1 comments
sdegutis 3622 days ago
It depends on what kind of programs you like to write. Personally I like to write things like programming languages or VT100-based text editors. And I like the added challenges that C presents, especially related to data modeling, memory management, lack of first-class functions, etc. So C is a natural choice for me, whereas JS adds little to no value, and actually takes away the challenge.
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coroutines 3622 days ago
I hate installing things. :x I get pretty turned on by offering up something like Google Sheets as a webapp that installs and is usable in seconds over the Internet. I used to really love Lua but even though it was <1MB to install people didn't want to download it and then run my script on its interpreter. I remember I made the choice to play in Lua after Python because Python was a large install at the time (60MB for interpreter + standard libs). I honestly feel like the desktop experience is moving into the browser. It's very convenient to "install your runtime" by going to a web address. I love being somewhere near the front lines of that. :3 </zealous-panting>
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sdegutis 3621 days ago
Sure, unless you're the guy who writes Minecraft. People installed that. And Atom. And Spotify. There's still some room for desktop apps like these, granted not as much as before.
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coroutines 3621 days ago
I'm not saying people won't install desktop apps - I just like that there is a diminishing reason to do it outside the browser. [High performance] games, browsers themselves, video players (VLC), and dev environments, are some of the last things left...
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