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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Swing is that everything in Swing looks like a dog's breakfast and nobody under 40 knows how to use it.

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That is because they are all busy trying to make HTML/CSS/JS work like GUI tools we already had in the 90's, while failing to do so without major hacks, which then get written in blog posts as some kind of victory.

React is the latest example of it. Great! They just discovered how many 80's UI's used event loops.

I have a lot of sympathy for this view. But the results are that a good-looking Web UI is better accepted than a consistent and full-featured Swing-based UI, in no small part because it's more difficult for Web designers to make Swing apps look good.

> it's more difficult for Web designers to make Swing apps look good.

Maybe they should bother to learn how to do it in first place?

People should do a lot of things. What they actually do is what matters. Despite all the web-inspired frameworks trying pave over real UI stacks in mobile devices, they have not succeeded in web-izing mobile UI. So, thankfully, we can turn our attention to the civil war of pubsub vs observer.

Yeah, I agree in what concerns the mobile space.

Primary reason it's accepted is because people generally don't have a choice. It's rare to find an alternative to any given service that offers the same functionality but doesn't follow latest designer fads.

Having programmed both I genuinely believe that reacts unidirectional approach is superior to swings mvc approach.

And I even argue that it's possible to make swing apps that fit nearly seamlessly into a platform given enough attention to detail which is not a popular opinion.

And this is why we end up with JS frameworks that fails to adequately solve problems that were solved decades ago.

How long did it take again to get anything resembling proper layout controls in a web application? Oh wait, we still don't have it. Motif had a better model for this back in the 80's.

> nobody under 40 knows how to use it.

Wow, you must be a grumpy old man, hating those youngsters. They can't even tie their shoelaces alone...

Actually I have seen some people under 40, who could use a microwave oven, use a smart phone, and some could even use desktop applications. I believe many of them can find their way around stuff outside the web browser.

Regarding developing swing apps as "use swing": I have managed to do it after reading the docs, and I'm under 40. It was actually more pleasant than using HTML+JS.

Sort of the opposite, really. I'm one of those old guys who remembers attempts such as Swingweb and GWT to compete with Web UI stacks.

> nobody under 40 knows how to use it.

Reading the docs is a good place to learn. That's how I did it when I was under 40.

If you can't learn how to use Swing, it means you are a bad programmer. It does not depend on your age. You might not be willing to learn, or have some other reasons, but claiming that Swing is somehow so old that young people are not able to learn it is just plain false and completely unsubstantiated.

The former is fixed by a solid look-and-feel, but the latter is definitely a problem (though I'm certainly under 40, I've never met another Swing dev in person and make most of my money elsewhere).

Nobody under 40 knows how to use it, or WANTS to use it? Doesn't take much experience to dink through a few tutorials on yet another GUI paradigm.

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