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by madeofpalk 1032 days ago
I've been writing some code in React.js and its been rather pleasent and performant.
1 comments

Yeah but it's web tech. Desktop apps should feel like desktop apps, not a glorified webpage
Why?

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I only care about the functionality and not whether the button should have round edges or the background having the right shade of grey. The consistent "feel" is nice to have (cough winform/wpf/uwp cough), but I would take "web-ish" applications over no application/crappy native application anytime (especially with Linux)

Native's not crappy, it's the best and most supported. We just happen to be in love with the web aesthetic and cross-platform. And that decisionmaking is mostly made by MBAs who see tech as a means to a financial end and not for the joy of writing good code

Web shit is fucking ugly, it eschews platform native conventions, and it just feels cheap.

But when I load up a winforms-esque app with toolbars and a statusbar and all the nice accoutrements we're accustomed too behaving in the way we are accustomed to... now I feel like I'm going to get shit done.

Literally the only electron app that feels serious is VSCode and the amount of optimizing MS has had to do has cut into seven figures

What makes Python native and JS not?

n.b. just because CPython exists doesn't mean Python is native.

n.b. native vs. web is colloquially a discussion from 00s macOS and 10s mobile about fidelity to the platform's standard UI toolkit.

n.b. when people shit on Electron its because of RAM use and lack of fidelity to the platform toolkit, and the waste of have a full JS engine compiled into an app, ideally they'd all use some base WebView from the system instead of Chromium

I am talking about using the platform's native windowing controls.

> ideally they'd all use some base WebView from the system instead of Chromium

Ideally they don't use any of that web trash and use something that favors the native platform conventions

This is some weird flavor of moralizing technology. Normal people literally do not care or even notice.
What's the difference between Javascript and Python? Neither are "native" to any operating system.
Have fun copying that error message from a non-selectable label widget...
Platform native dialogs almost always let you copy text with CTRL+C

And winforms labels have a selectable mode.

React Native it is, then
Why so in love with React? There are a million other ways to write good GUI apps without involving Facebook's clockwork
Why so in love with pyqt? There are a million other ways to write good GUI apps without having to distribute a full python and qt environment.