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This “there are no full stack devs” meme is horseshit. I’ll accept that keeping up with web frontend (especially JS) is very challenging lately, and requires a substantial investment of time. But I have experience doing every single one of the “impossible” list of skills, even having used most of these skills at the same company. We’re not unicorns, we just have more than five years in the field.
My take on it is that full-stack development is really only relevant on very small teams (1-5 devs), and that specialization happens from there, and that’s a good thing. Looking for full-stack devs on a team that’s bigger than this is usually the result of lazy resource planning. But when you don’t have a lot of hands on keyboards, full-stack or “T-shaped” developers are a great asset.
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Agreed. I’m really sick of this meme too. There are a LOT of apps/sites out there that are small, simple, and serve a limited audience very well. Not every app needs tons of developers. It’s really insulting to us full-stack people who take pride in keeping those apps running, to imply or outright say we must be bad at our jobs.
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It is rare for me to hear a dev say what they work on is ‘simple,’ even if it is. I’ve felt that a lot of programming in industry is somewhat simple with mountains of incidental complexity brought on by inexperience, poor practices, bad languages and paradigms, and unrelenting schedules. But devs seem unable to separate these things from one another, so it feels taboo to say something like that.
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“Keeping up with the frontend” is a bit rough, right?
Like, the products we work on don’t magically fall apart every time a new framework comes out–we do this to ourselves.
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I’ve done all those things as well, and web isn’t really my field. I really thought this would be something along the lines of what @technomancy said, in which case I would not yet qualify. And I fully agree with @hwayne’s comment, and simply consider myself a generalist.
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Agreed. There definitely are full stack developers, and while they need to have irons in a lot of dumpster fires to remain up to date on all of the fads, the collection of moving parts is fairly small really: some database knowledge, some SOA knowledge, and some presentation knowledge.
I think there’s some nuance missing in your “full-stack development is for small teams” idea: I agree with that part of it, but the part that growing the team means adding specialisation seems to imply that growing a team is natural and inevitable, so that small generalist teams evolve into large specialist teams. Either is a way to staff a software team, software teams have probably succeeded or failed using either approach, and a well-performing small team of generalists will probably continue to deliver successfully without adding some specialists. A well-performing large team of specialists will probably continue to deliver successfully, too.
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This “there are no full stack devs” meme is horseshit.
Saying it’s horseshit is, itself, horseshit unless you have a syllabus which, when mastered, will make someone a full-stack developer.
Until then, it’s equivalent to being “Cool”:
What makes someone “Cool”? Being “Cool”.
OK… who’s “Cool”? Not you…
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I thought this was going to be Sailor Scouts and I am VERY disappointed. Which sailor scout is Ruby? Haskell? Perl? The world needs to know!
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Ruby = Mars (It’s because they both fit a red theme. Rei is unsubtle like that.)
Haskell = Uranus (Because of the inner sadness, and the commitment to keep going anyway.)
Perl = Mercury (Not necessary often, but always there and part of the team, and very powerful when she’s needed.)
I agree with zdsmith’s point that the gendered language is distracting. I like your approach to dealing with that, coming up with an alternate headcanon. :) So I decided to help with it. :)
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This is pretty interesting and I appreciate Position being worker run and owned - not to mention the work life balance, diversity, inclusion, and social justice. It’s just a shame that it’s onsite only. I’d apply if I were near NYC.
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Thanks! We don’t really have the processes in place to make remote work a possibility but maybe someday. Tech Coop Network may have some similar cooperatives that are more remote friendly!
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Hey, have you checked https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8646069 ?
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Yep, I posted the ad there too! But I don’t think many people will see it there, group seems kinda dead already.
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I find my work meaningful. I make web apps for independent magazines and book publishers, and my work helps keep them in business. I like our clients and I think THIER work is important, so that’s very rewarding.
Besides the actual software development/billable client work, my company is very small and worker-run, so I do a lot of business-y sort of work. I find that work meaningful too because we’re trying to create a very different sort of tech company with values and practices that we believe in.
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What I’d like is an institution that would take a traditional baccalaureat in computer science and all it’s prerequisites and then offerend hand tailored programs that adapt to schedules, learning disabilities and any other classical roadblock to higher education.
Basically just a guided way for self-learners to attain higher learning creds their own way would do.
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I attended a community college part-time for years. In some ways it was great, in others it was awful. I never finished my degree – I was never able to finish the online pre-calculus course that was a requirement to take calculus, which was a requirement to graduate with an A.A.S.
I took two semesters of Java, but barely got to the concepts of stacks and queues, and didn’t even touch on trees or recursion. “You don’t need that stuff,” my teacher said. And it was probably true. Most of my classmates never even used Java again – they went on to write Visual Basic at local businesses if the did any programming at all.
I also took classes in Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, and basic networking. Those were all at least enjoyable, and the networking one actually taught me stuff I still use! I also took a terrible C# class – the person who was supposed to teach it quit the week before class started, and our new teacher had never written a line of C# in his life.
The greatest thing about community college was that I could get student loans and grants and spend time learning from books and the internet and meetups while doing the bare minimum schoolwork. If I wasn’t someone with the privilege and ability to learn that way, I wouldn’t have been any more prepared than your average 3-month bootcamper. My programming career only got started because I got into Recurse Center. :/ So, while I’m grateful for my community college experience, it’s hard for me to recommend it as a solution to this mess.
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Thanks, that matches my understanding although I don’t have the personal experience. I think CC tends to focus on the wrong thing (c++ “for games” seems to be a particular topic) without teaching principles, but there’s still some benefit. You can at least learn that programs are just text, words in a file, and you can make the computer do what you want. Maybe this takes place in a Java setting, but hopefully at least some of the “computers are tools” concept rubs off and you can learn to write VB or ruby or whatever.
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There’s the start of maybe a trend towards making community college free as well, plus many more places where it’s not free, but still quite cheap.
Another plus of community college is that it’s more integrated, even if loosely, with the rest of the university system, which leaves options open for deciding later what you really want to do. You can usually transfer CC credits to a 4-year university if you decide later you want a traditional CS degree (or even continue for a masters or PhD), without having to commit up-front to that decision.
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I’m from Quebec, so we dont really have the concept of community college, but I went through most of a cegep (our sort of pre-uni college) degree in computer programming and it was way too easy and most of what I learned I did on my own. If I want to go do the trad comp sci uni program I need to do at least two semesters of math and science classes as prerequisites. Now I’ve tried doing this, but I dont know if it’s a mix of wanting to work and raving ADHD, but I could never stay in those classes for more than two months.
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Lots of schools offer a non-traditional CS track, at least for graduate programs.
There are problems, though. One is that the SV elites have decided that college is a waste of time unless you’re at Stanford or MIT (and maybe even then). Another is that college is expensive. Boot camps are around $10,000, that’s about 1/5 of what even the cheapest state schools cost. When you factor in the opportunity cost of four years compared with 12 weeks the difference is much larger. Finally, many boot camp students already have degrees and some schools are hesitant to enroll students seeking second bachelor’s degrees. I’m not entirely sure why, but I know this from personal experience.
As an aside, IMHO the article hits the nail on the head when it points out that unions (and I would add tenure) are really what SV hates about our education system.
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Just to quibble with your numbers: CSU San Bernardino, the school I attended, costs roughly $2,000 per quarter (the specific amount per person may vary due to class-specific fees). With three regular quarters of attendance each year (most people do not do summer classes), that’s roughly $6,000/year. At an average graduation period of five years, that’s $30,000, which is not nothing, but would put the ratio at 1/3 against a $10,000 bootcamp, not 1/5.
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It has gone up slightly, to I believe about $2,200 (my fiance is about to graduate from the same school. I can ask her for the exact amount if you’d like to know). I should note that even these amounts are hotly contested and opposed for a number of reasons, including:
- When California’s three-tier post-secondary education system was created, the CSU was intended to operate without charging tuition to students. At the time, the state covered all or nearly all costs of the CSU campuses, with students paying small fees specific to the classes in which they enrolled. This was in service to the idea that the CSU is targeted toward students who would not otherwise have access to a four year degree program (even today, CSU San Bernardino prides itself on its extremely high rate of students graduating who are low income, minorities, and/or the first in their family to go to or graduate from college). Today, over 50% of CSU costs are covered by student tuition and fees, and that margin is rising.
- At the same time, the administrative staff of CSU campuses has grown immensely, with simultaneous decreases in the number of tenure-track faculty positions. New faculty jobs are overwhelmingly adjunct positions (which, if you’re unfamiliar, include many of the responsibilities of tenure-track professors, but with no professional protections or benefits, and extremely low pay). I actually worked at CSU San Bernardino for a few months this year as an Adjunct Lecturer, and my best friend’s mother is an adjunct professor at CSU San Bernardino as well. I can say firsthand that if you do not have some other source of income, it is not possible to support yourself on the pay from that job alone.
- Campuses are getting more and more crowded, resulting in longer times to graduation. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the CSUSB average slip to 6 years soon. A large part of this stems from rules set in the CSU charter, which limit the ability of the CSU campuses to control the influx of students. The effect of this for students is that they pay more in the long run, because they are unable to finish their degree on time.
- Additionally, many financial aid offerings still assume a four-year degree program, so many students find themselves struggling to support themselves financially for the last year or two of their degree. (A good friend of mine recently had to become a part-time student, paying reduced tuition but taking fewer classes, because he simply doesn’t make enough to pay for a full-time schedule. He attends CSUSB).
I could go on. I just wanted to make clear that although the tuition for the CSU campuses remains low relative to many other four year degree programs, the current state of things is not perfect, and there are many avenues for improvement.
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It is. While some of the thingsI laid out above are specific to the CSU, they are part of a larger trend across higher education of rising costs, bloated administrations, more adjunct positions, fewer tenure-track positions, and less public investment.
If you look around in the literature, there are a lot of competing explanations for why all of this is happening. My sense is that it’s a confluence of causes, including:
- The rise of college ranking systems which include lots of ancillary measures in their consideration, like “student life” offerings which cost substantial amounts of money to build and/or operate. Universities want to be competitive in the rankings, and so they feel as if they have to do things like build out fancy new dorms or offer free services and classes (“free” really meaning “prepaid,” as students often unwittingly pay for these things with their fees and tuition).
- Rising administrative costs, often justified as “what we need to pay to retain the top people.” Some of this is just optics. I know at CSUSB that the university President makes a lot of money, which some people find distasteful, but his salary is actually not paid for by the university (i.e. by student fees and tuition), but by the university foundation (i.e. fundraising). Now, there is an argument to be made that the money which goes to pay the President should instead go to the university, but so long as the President is making more money for the university in fundraising than he costs the university in salary and benefits, I think this trade is worthwhile. A lot of what university presidents do is in fact fundraising for their school.
- Long term pressures on young people to attend college means that more students are attending college (which is, all things being equal, great!). But it also means that some students are making financial tradeoffs they may not otherwise make, and maybe shouldn’t make. I believe strongly in the value of a liberal education (“liberal” here meaning “education in a wide range of fields, and which exposes you to people and thought outside of your usual zone”), but I recognize that the cost of such an education may be more than people in some fields can reasonably afford. This is where schools focused on particular fields or trades can help, and I do think we are seeing a trend toward more of these sorts of schools. They of course have their own problems which need to be sorted out (see any discussion of “coding bootcamps,” including this one, or schools like ITT Tech and DeVry), but there is a space there for quality institutions which educate their students in a particular field without the costs associated with the broader education of a four-year degree program.
I could go on. Suffice to say that this is a complicated issue, and that these trends are happening for a lot of reasons. I do hope that they correct over time, and that some of today’s worrying trends are stymied sooner rather than later.
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I know I’ve already commented, but I have a separate point which deserves its own post:
California’s three-tier higher education system is really interesting, and the way it works today is quite a bit different from how it was initially envisioned.
First, you have the community colleges. These are intended to be 2-year degree institutions providing low-cost, flexible education opportunities. They are very community focused, and often target people whose life circumstances would otherwise keep them from an education. For example, a person who works a 40-hour/week job and can only attend classes at night would not be able to get the education they want at a 4-year institution, but often can at a community college.
Second, you have the California State Universities. These were originally intended to be 4-year undergraduate-only institutions with a focus on providing low-cost (though higher than the community colleges) education. A number of CSU campuses actually began as trade schools (CSUSB began as a school for teachers), and the focus on providing concrete professional-oriented education remains. The CSU is where someone who wants a good degree-requiring career but can’t afford a larger school can go to get a solid education at a reasonable price.
Third, you have the University of California system. These are the universities which grant doctorates, Master’s degrees, and undergraduate degrees. They are more expensive, and the focus is on research and progression of students (generally) into either academia or professional academic positions.
Today, each of these systems has their problems:
The community colleges are extremely overburdened. It turns out a lot of people like the idea of a cheap, flexible, accessible education, and the system simply can’t keep up. Many students go to community college with the intention of covering classes which would be more expensive to take at a CSU and transferring when they have their Associates degree. Many of them end up staying at the community colleges for 4 or more years, unable to get the classes they need to graduate, and often unable to transfer and retain their credits when they do. The general consensus I have seen for these students is that the tradeoff isn’t worth it. Just among my friend group many end up choosing alternative options, including film school or joining the military.
I outlined issues with the CSU in the previous post, and won’t spell them out again here.
The UCs have the same problems as the CSU, really. They’re getting more expensive, and the financial tradeoffs for students don’t necessarily make sense anymore. I am less familiar with the UC system, and so I will leave it here. If you’d like to know more, I can reach out to friends who attended different UC campuses and get their take on the problems currently facing the system.
I want to reiterate a point which I think is important: the fact that these systems are having problems does not mean that they are broken and irredeemable, that they don’t still improve the lives of a great many students, or that they are not worthwhile public investments. It just means that there are things which the public, the students, the employees, the administrators, and the lawmakers have to grapple with in determining their own future in relation to these systems, and the future of the systems themselves.
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I spent a few years as a researcher at UC Santa Cruz, and my impression is as you say, the problems are very similar to those at the CSUs. The UCs have traditionally cost more than the CSUs (though still historically quite cheap) because of some mixture of: 1) more expensive facilities, 2) internationally known professors with higher salaries, and 3) lower teaching loads for the professors, since they were expected to also maintain significant research programs. Although at the top-tier UCs (e.g. Berkeley) this was partly offset by the profs bringing in big research grants to cover some of the facilities and salaries.
Today, professors’ salaries are a smaller and smaller percentage of the total though, and the biggest cost increases are capital expenditures (so #1 is still true) and large increases in the number of highly paid administrators. In addition I believe state funding has fallen even more sharply than at the CSUs, because as “flagship” schools the UCs are seen as potential cash cows, able to attract wealthy students from abroad and out-of-state, who pay the higher out-of-state tuition rates.
As far as state funding cuts go, I compiled some numbers 5 years ago on total and per-student funding, inflation-adjusted, 1965–2012, for the UC system as a whole. The headline figure is that in 1965 the state kicked in $24,000/student (2012 dollars), and in 2012 they kicked in $12,800/student. The peak was in the 1980s, when it kicked in around $30k/student.
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Thanks for all the info! I’m glad that my understanding is in line with what other people have found.
One interesting point I didn’t make in my other posts is that the CSU campuses are beginning to offer Master’s and Doctorate degrees (CSUSB now offers a Doctorate of Education program, and a number of Master’s degree programs, for example). This sort of shift helps to blur the line between the CSU and UC systems, although of course that blurring will take quite some time to shift public perception.
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Why is this a flexible goal? What will you do with the money if it doesn’t hit the $10K minimum needed for the venue?
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The $10k minimum needed for the venue was not something I was aware of when I set this up. I will reach out to the organizers and see if they can answer.
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There’s also fundraising going on outside of the Indiegogo in the form of sponsorships, so it’s very possible that the Indiegogo might not reach $10K but the sponsorships cover the gap.
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A segment from the code of conduct on the website:
No one at any events associated with Maitria, may speak to, touch, stare at, follow, or otherwise engage someone without their consent. Making jokes within earshot of someone you know (or even think) is upset by them is a violation of consent. Acting as though someone’s gender is other than what they say it is is also a violation of consent. Doing things that people feel shitty about is often a violation of consent.
In another context, I would assume this is satire.
This conference is clearly more about politics than it is about research or technology.
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It’s a shame they have to spell out rules for behaviour that amount to common decency, but I think it’s clear at this point that there are people who don’t get it. So I don’t think it’s fair to say that this is “more about politics than it is about research of technology”, since one of the ways you get a good conference is to make sure that anyone who has something valuable to contribute is able to do so while feeling they’re in a safe environment. Otherwise they won’t come, and then everyone loses out.
Having said that, I’m a bit confused about “No one at any events associated with Maitria, may speak to […] or otherwise engage someone without their consent”. How do you get consent to speak to someone without speaking to them, or engaging them in some other way? If there’s to be no engagement, then you may as well just watch the videos on YouTube.
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If you feel the need to authoritatively spell out the exact rules for every single social interaction at your event, you’re going to attract two kinds of people: people who are obsessed with weird constructed social rules and feel the need to force them on other people, and people who try to get in-group status through these constructed social rules.
You will not attract the most talented people. The most talented people care about the topic, not whether or not you’re willing to use “xer” instead of “him” or apply rules from feminist sexual theory to everyday interactions.
The most talented people I know almost universally hate this kind of stuff and consider it a waste of energy. I can’t help but agree. I personally would not attend a conference where the focus is clearly on (controlling) the social dynamics of the attendees rather than the nominal topic of the conference.
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If you feel the need to authoritatively spell out the exact rules for every single social interaction at your event, you’re going to attract two kinds of people: people who are obsessed with weird constructed social rules and feel the need to force them on other people, and people who try to get in-group status through these constructed social rules.
I mean, you totally do get both those sorts of people, but you also get (in much larger numbers) people who couldn’t care less and want to go to a conference.
You will not attract the most talented people. The most talented people care about the topic, not whether or not you’re willing to use “xer” instead of “him” or apply rules from feminist sexual theory to everyday interactions.
A few of the talented people do care (one way or the other) and insist on going to conferences that (respectively) have (or do not have) a code of conduct. It even sounds like you’re one of them, which makes it seem unlikely that you regularly socialize with people who hold the opposite view (I mean, statistically; of course it’s possible that you do).
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Immediately after the quoted section in the coc, it answers your question:
But if I have to have consent, how do I ever start a conversation?
Some folks have asked this, so here’s some clarification.
We make guesses or assessments of consent (willingness, welcome, invitation) all the time. Then we stay open to signs that the consent isn’t there. A friendly smile might indicate consent to start a conversation. It might not. We learn that in the interaction. We are open to making mistakes, and learning from them. Sometimes we ask directly. The more we learn to be empathetic and see other people, the more we’re able to talk about consent.
I think a lot of times people expect that a code of conduct has to be a “do any of this and you get thrown out!” type ruleset, and I think that here, Maitria is going more for guidelines and expectations rather than strict rules. Attendees are invited to ask questions if they aren’t sure if something is appropriate. As a socially awkward person, I think this is lovely.
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This fills an important void in the functional programming community, as the only other FP conference has become a space where many marginalized people no longer feel safe.
I assume this is referring to LambdaConf, but I think it’s a little unkind to other organizers to describe that as the “only” other FP conference. What about CUFP? ICFP? LambdaJam? Not to mention all of the language-specific conferences out there.
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totally fair and thanks for pointing this out. I’ve updated the text.
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Yeah, this is a mistake – I messaged the fundraiser in case she’s not watching this.
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It’s directly related to your comment. You said “I assume this is referring to LambdaConf”, and I’m not entirely sure what you are referring to. I’ve only heard of the one incident where people were complaining about the conference hosting some political outlier. If you think it’s off-topic, don’t bring it up.
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You can watch videos from last year on YouTube. I wasn’t able to attend last time, but can’t wait for this year!
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horrorcheck
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Littlesis - a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government
I know the developer at Little Sis. They would appreciate volunteer coding help, if anyone’s looking for stuff to do.
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I made a Firefox extension that hid or highlighted posts with certain keywords for a similar site, I could probably adapt it to block users on Lobste.rs, if you’d be interested.
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horrorcheck
edited
1 year ago
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What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
13 years ago: C++. I was a freshman CS major. “Intro to CS” was in C++. This literally changed my career – I changed majors because I hated it so much. (Although, this was less about C++ itself and more the whole learning environment.) (And I kept programming games and websites for fun.)
3 years ago: Haskell. I’d decided to go back to school (a local community college) for programming just because after 10 years of searching, it turned out I wasn’t good at anything else. I was learning Java, but it was just about trying to get a piece of paper to get a job. Then I found out about Haskell somehow and got into this whole other world.
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Inform is my favorite of this sort of language. I really liked it when I wrote interactive fiction. Here’s a bit of a game Emily Short wrote:
The Scarlet Tower is southeast of the Scarlet Gallery. "A little hexagonal room, from whose [narrow window] you can see the moat, the lawn, and the beginning of the forest outside." The narrow window is scenery in the Scarlet Tower. The outdoors is scenery in the Scarlet Tower. Understand "moat" and "lawn" and "forest" as the outdoors.
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Interactive code snippets were the coolest thing about this site. I get it’s hard with the FP Complete editor gone but it would be good to know if anyones working on it or they need help or what.
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Hi, I’m Libby. I work at Position Development, a software company that’s becoming a workers' co-op. I work on software for folks like Verso Books and Jacobin Magazine. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time working with dbp on a couple Haskell libraries – a Wordpress library and an HTML templating language. I’ve also written a few tutorials for a web framework, fn.
I attended Recurse Center last year, and my favorite project that I started there was smooch, a viewer for the Kisekae Set System. It’s written in C, Haskell, and JavaScript and I was a beginner at all three when I started so it’s a bit of a mess. It’s not even close to usable but every once in a while I work on it.
I also enjoy reading, sewing, and roller skating. I’d like to get better at writing.
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It was fantastic! I loved it and would highly recommend the experience to anyone.
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Starting my new job on tuesday! The main stack is php so I’m going to have to get back into the language.
And though I had secretly hoped never to have to write php again it might be interesting trying to tangle with both old spaguetti code and a modern laravel app.
I’m also starting a new contract writting a small website for a hair salon. I’ve been trying to get a decent hakyll build on gitlab-ci. I can get it to build, but it takes so long I need to find a way to cache stuff.
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This the worker co-op?
I’ve used Hakyll with Circle CI and the caching helped a lot…
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Yes exactly! I decided to give it a try, worst case scenario I still have a few contracts to sustain me. Though one of those contracts is fixing a horrible mess of a wordpress website, the main page makes my cpu work 50 times more (from 2% to 99%)
Without caching the gitlab ci takes about 30 minutes to do a build, I’m trying to bring it down to 5.
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That’s neat. My workplace (http://positiondev.com) is becoming a worker co-op, so I’m very curious about other tech co-ops.
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The main concern I have about coops (at least the way mine is implemented) is that there is no distinction between employees, the senior dev is payed the same as the junior, the only variation being the number of shares and the number of hours. I feel like it discourages long term commitment to the company.
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Sure, pairing is more tiring than solo coding, but I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with introversion. I’m very introverted, but I don’t find pairing socially draining at all, not after a little time spent getting know the other person’s style. And my extroverted coworkers seem just as tired after a long day. :)
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I’m an introvert, and I don’t find pairing to be more draining relative to the amount of work that gets done. It’s just that in my experience pairing just gets more done in the same amount of time, which tends to wear you out more.
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Personally, my main reason for not using Atom as an editor is because it’s a web browser.
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Its a sad direction for software development. Just bundling applications inside a browser and releasing it as a “app”.
Then saying that there is enough CPU/RAM to waste, for example Spotify can take up to 30 seconds to launch. All it has to do is to steam music, display lists with some images.
Javascript has its places and uses, but building desktop applications on top of it is just lazy.
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On the one hand, I generally agree that the bundled-up-webpage style of “native” app development results in a crappy product. There’s plenty of examples of this.
On the other hand, specifically in the case of Atom, which is trying to be a sort-of 21st century Emacs, it makes a lot of sense to want the UI to be expressible as a well-understood, easy-to-work-with DOM.
This enables plugins to do a lot of things with UI that are hard-or-downright impossible in Emacs' ad-hoc, highly limited UI modification hooks (it’s damn near impossible just to draw a vertical line in emacs).
Is HTML the optimal DOM for a text-editor-cum-programming-environment? No. But it’s well-known and well-understood, and starting from scratch would have taken a lot longer.
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I learned about picture-mode thanks to this comment. SO COOL!! Thank you! BRB making all the ascii arts…
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I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand as you said native code is always going to be faster, “feel better” (tighter intergration with the rest of the system), etc. However a lot of native GUI frameworks are pretty messy. (Anyone who has worked with GTK will likely know the pain that it brings). The web model at least provides a nice separation between the design and the program logic. (There are other more native frameworks that do this to some extent, but I feel this is still a significant reason why the web model is used so much). I also like how the web model allows for portability and distributivity with (relative) ease. This does not mean that I feel the electron/node-webkit method of developing software is a good one, and I personally can’t stand using programs made in this way, if for no other reason than my PC is relatively old and the slowdown is noticeable. I do think native frameworks have something to learn from the web, and in an ideal world I would like to see some kind of method of building GUIs that can be served over the web or natively and function well in both instances.
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I also have mixed opinions, in part because while I’m a bit skeptical of the webtech-everywhere trend, the native-GUI-toolkit side of things is a gigantic mess too, and often not even that native. There are definitely people who do write 100% native GUI applications, but that requires going all-in on one platform. A fairly strong niche are the people who develop OSX-only applications, using all the Apple APIs directly, trying to do things in line with the OSX norms and look-and-feel guidelines, etc. The downside is that when you go all-in on native OSX like this, your app only runs on OSX.
The in-between option is a cross-platform toolkit that translates to the native GUI toolkit. That ends up as a kind of halfway house, using the native widgets to get as close to a native look-and-feel as possible, but by necessity not quite using them idiomatically, because they need to be unified or abstracted over in a way that can target a bunch of platforms simultaneously. GTK, Qt, and Java’s Swing sort of fit in there, and while they work, I wouldn’t really go out of my way to sing their praises as the one true way to do GUIs.
You can even sort of see the wrapped-webkit type of app as a roundabout realization of something that was a goal of a lot of desktop-Linux people in the late ‘90s: that instead of people writing GUI apps to a specific platform’s toolkit (usually Windows), the GUI layer should be done in a library, with the platform only needing to provide something relatively low-level and common, like a framebuffer to draw the widgets in. Tk was an attempt at that that enjoyed some success for a time.
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the one unreservedly good thing i can say about web-on-the-desktop is that it’s the lazy way to develop applications. “lazy” means that you have done what you wanted to do with the least amount of fighting with various toolkits, languages, etc that make your task harder. the fact that you pay the price in cpu and ram consumption and potentially in responsiveness is a huge drawback, but that just means that no one has made a good enough “lazy” alternative yet.
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But HTML5 is native in Internet Explorer 9, 10, 11 and 12 on Windows! (Only on Windows!)
How do you want your HTML5?
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Partly, yes, it’s due to the performance. Even on a fast computer, if you open enough such apps, the entire computer will end up slowing down. However, I also find the tendency of the web tech model to try applying itself to everything a tad… superfluous and useless.
Originally, HTML was designed to add links to a markup language, then CSS was added to stylize it, and finally JS was added as a scripting language for the web. Since then, it has all been evolved into being used for nearly everything, from text editors to web browsers. It wasn’t designed for this; it was designed as a way to display text, and link to other text. Nowadays, HTML and CSS seem to have become a UI specification that is difficult for both computers and humans alike to process, and JS has become a haphazardly thrown together mess
⁰with the mindset that it should encompass everything.Personally, I can understand the urge to try to get something to do everything
¹, but that of course means that there comes an increase in complexity. Complexity is usually never good, you end up with things like this or this happening. Complexity also causes speed issues, which is what the majority people seem to dislike about such efforts. However, mainly I find the complexity of a web browser sitting atop the complexity of an operating system sitting atop the complexity of a backwards-compatible CPU to be appalling to think about². We might as well create an operating system that is mostly a web browser to help reduce complexity.It is the very attempt to use “web tech on the desktop model” that I dislike about it, not merely side effects such as the performance hit. In the past, we’ve made SMTP become a file-sharing mechanism and made unicode become a clip-art provider. Maybe this time, we should spend more time figuring out what we want the web to do, instead of haphazardly forcing it to do everything
³.⁰Admittedly, JS is trying to become better.
¹I admit, it is quite fun to make something do something it wasn’t explicitly designed to do.
²Being the hypocrite that I am, though, this doesn’t preclude me from actually using a web browser on OS X on an Intel i5 chip to share these thoughts with you. This is mainly because it seems to work well enough for now, and it looks nice.
³Whoops, too late, it’s already used for everything.:(-
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It worked for the web, so why not just attach JavaScript to PDFs.
:(-
I don’t know whether I’m happy or depressed this exists. I’m a bit happy because it’s a great place to point people who are a little too eager to do everything in a web browser, however the existence of such a project makes me think that maybe we should all move over to TempleOS.
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I’m going to: