[malandrew]

Engineering is taking all the bits and pieces out there and choosing the right ones for the problem you're trying to solve with engineering. It's not just choosing those components, but doing all the work to figure out how they should work together to solve your problem and building the pieces that bring them all together.

Using something that does all that for you is tantamount to outsourcing all the engineering work to the makers of that thing.

If you're given and entire system and just have to put the pieces together according to what the client needs, then you're basically a plumber.

Now there is nothing wrong with that, it makes good business sense, which is the justification you provide, but its not really engineering. Or if it is, it's only a small subset of the problems engineering solves.

Do you think the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam or the Space Shuttle didn't have to think about all the bits and pieces they would need source and bring together into one coherent whole? That's engineering.

[rantanplan]

You are in a different conversation.

Unless you're trying to tell me that people who build e.g. KDE with the Qt framework are plumbers and people who develop with Backbone.js are engineers. In which case I wouldn't want to engage in such a discussion.

[malandrew]

Nice strawman.

Neither Angular nor React nor Backbone are equivalent to KDE or Qt, so those are false equivalencies use to construct a poor excuse for a strawman.

The user agents (browsers) and the web as a platform is the closest equivalent to Qt, since collectively, they abstract away all the differences between platforms as Qt does. Collectively and individually they represent excellent examples of engineering. The problem with them is that the problem they are trying to solve basically changed from what Tim Berners-Lee originally tried to solved. He tried to make a hyperlinked document platform, not an app platform. The web is now trying to evolve to supporting apps while also remaining a good documentation platform.

React would be most closely equivalent to added the paint/draw and retain-mode graphics part of Qt to the web. Flux and its different implementations and the various libraries out are likely equivalent to different solutions for events and data stores available in the Qt ecosystem, but I'm not a Qt developer so I wouldn't know. Those who built react are doing engineering as are those who build with react, it's just that the latter are absolved from solving the engineering problems related to render/paint/layout and retain-mode graphics.

Angular is an attempt to bundle everything together (render/draw, events, data) into one monolithic framework solution, doing reasonably well, but none exceptionally well. Those who built angular are doing engineering. However, those who build with angular are basically doing plumbing.

People who build with KDE and people who build with angular are basically performing the same type of work.

I don't know what backbone is equivalent to in the KDE or Qt world, but I would imagine it's probably some early library/quasi-framework in the Qt world when it was still the wild west and there weren't very good engineering practices and project organization strategies in Qt projects.

I can't believe I wasted my time responding to your logical fallacy.

[rantanplan]

Take a deep breath and relax.

First of all I stupidly thought that the part about KDE/GTK which is in this comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8508094, was included in the comment to which you replied. So my bad and -1 for me.

What I meant is I don't think that anyone sees Qt or GTK as monolithic systems and they are about 1000 times more complex than any JS library you could name, as they solve a myriad problems to which JS is oblivious and wouldn't be able to solve anyway.

Contrast that with the web situation today, where they can't even decide which is the view, which the controller or "hey, maybe these don't map very well on the web side of things". Yes I agree about Tim Berners-Lee and the http stuff. But at some point things have to converge into something coherent, because the problem we have to solve is quite elementary, compared to other technologies.

Also if you honestly believe that people who developed KDE and people who develop with AngularJS are performing the same type of work... it just betrays the fact that you're just a JS programmer and haven't seen some real engineering work.

Javascript touches the tip of the iceberg with regards to technical challenge and Software Engineering, so please... just take a breath :)