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by randomtwiddler 1482 days ago
It's interesting how you can look down on front end for being new and naive while suggesting that Google is a fine reliable tech stack provider.

I'm the opposite of everything about this post. A very experienced dev (>20 years professional experience) that has moved primarily to the front end recently in my career (gradually over 4 years). I won't touch flutter simply because the sole vendor and essential dependency is Google.

Fads are present in every corner of development. As is "not invented here" or the general draw to green field.
1 comments
daenz 1482 days ago
If you're looking for a response, you're not really giving me much to respond to. Why do you think Google doesn't provide a "reliable tech stack" ? In any case, I wasn't suggesting that specifically (though I tend to agree with it), only that they have a coherent ergonomic vision by competent engineers.
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randomtwiddler 1482 days ago
Google doesn't have a track record of long term support for their projects. They readily cancel them when they want to.

I would hate to invest precious years into tech and apps to have the rug pulled out from under me because flutter entered the Google graveyard.

They do have competent engineers, and if they get sufficient community buy-in, I'll be much more open to it.

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daenz 1482 days ago
That's fair. I feel more confident about Google's OSS (like flutter) surviving than I do about Google's consumer products. The flutter community is very strong, and as far as offerings go, it's (imo) the strongest product that abstracts UI/UX development over web and mobile, and the demand for that abstraction is very real.

Plus having Dart (which feels a bit like Java, but less verbose) as the foundation language raises the bar in terms of library code quality (compared to Javascript at least)

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randomtwiddler 1482 days ago
BTW, nice to have these kinds of pro and con conversations about random tech. I don't get it at work as much as I'd like.

A lot of open source projects die when their corporate investor closes shop. The community is often just dependants who want to use the tech but don't have the ability to keep it running. And it is usually not big enough to come up with the funding for a foundation to run maintenance and development.

Flutter is very ambitious as a project. I have more direct experience with other similar projects like react native, which really struggles despite the investments.

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