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Comment by easong | Hacker News Reader

What stack are you using? The description you give doesn't match my experience with modern javascript (react, webpack, flow/typescript, etc).

If you have to build a desktop app with jquery soup (or even angular), I definitely feel for you.

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I'm using Electron ( shell? ) to make a simple desktop app. Certain things are much nicer, such as the ability to have everything be "owner draw" in a way that isn't as frustrating as using owner draw in the usual context. IE, I can easily at a bitmap background to whatever component I want. I can control a lot of the look/feel of the UI with style sheets.

IMHO, React is another way of covering up 20 years of bad design decisions that went into web tech. React is the natural reaction to using a tree of text to represent data structures. If things were done right, React wouldn't exist. By 'real modules' I mean things like DLLs that can be hot swapped at app start or at runtime. The more I look into things like Atom, the more I am disturbed by what constitutes 'state of the art' in web tech.

Have you used webpack? It allows for hot swapping and a bunch of other module features.

I mean, react (and associated frontend technologies) are just a way of making it easier to write code within the constraints of browsers, which are honestly a small miracle. Yes, they're a pile of hacks upon hacks (the web was designed to share physics papers, not deliver complicated multimedia applications), but they let you write the same code for every major operating system, device, and form factor that exists and deploy it seamlessly over an unreliable network. It's shocking that everything works as well as it does.

And as programmers, everything we use is just papering over the horror of writing network-connected cat-sharing apps on weird-shaped bits of metal - why worry about a light abstraction over the JS build step?

My experience with Atom has also been sub-par, but Visual Studio Code is pretty cool and built on the exact same platform (electron).

I think you're the exact target audience for typescript, for what it's worth. It will give you type checking, IDE integration, compiler errors, modules, etc basically for free and is (not exclusively, and IMHO) built for people who find javascript distasteful.

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