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by securityfreak 2930 days ago
Maybe "idiocy" is unnecessarily strong, but I certainly don't have to praise all emerging experiments just to sound polite, do I? The emerging of all these stacks is because of approachability. Everyone has a browser. Anyone who wants to create their first website can do so, by opening up e.g. notepad. By this approach you get low-quality, self-taught JS "experts" who are much cheaper to hire than a proper software engineer with fundamentals of computer science. After a few years these developers feel so confident, they decide to launch their own perfect new framework/library to solve all the problems they experienced!

There is a better solution. It's called native app development, without a hyphen of any sorts in front of "native". Different platforms have different quirks and there is no way to have the exact same UI/UX on all platforms.

The true challenge is to explain the executives, that hiring 2 developers will be much better in the long run, than 1 underpaid JS developer for all platforms.

3 comments

I used to agree with you. But over the last few years, in their own ways, Apple and Microsoft have dropped the ball on their native desktop UI toolkits. So, whereas the argument for native used to be "rewrite your client once per platform, and you get a better language, better performance, better usability, and a better development experience", now it's "rewrite your client once per platform and you may get a better language, depending on your taste, probably better performance, an aging closed-source toolchain, an outdated development paradigm, outdated APIs covered in legacy-barnacles, debugging-resistant performance pitfalls, and decent usability if you're ok with a generic one-size-fits-all look (and you're on your own if you're not.)" In other words, the argument for native, and native development itself, is not aging well.
> but I certainly don't have to praise all emerging experiments just to sound polite, do I?

Speaking from personal experience, I have found it vastly more productive to focus on the good than the bad. Yes, even in situations where the other person is literally [1] too dumb to put their underwear on correctly without assistance.

I don’t know how or why it works to do that, but it does, and the improvement from doing so is immense.

[1] Alzheimer’s.

it will get worse before it gets worser