Hacker News Reader

Comment by devrandomguy | Hacker News Reader

I have recently discovered that on HN, you can either downvote or reply, but not both.

As a dev who has used both React and a couple of native desktop UI libs, I get a fair bit of pushback on the whole Electron / app-in-browser idea. The primary concern seems to be performance, although I'm picking up an undercurrent of fear that the web stack could swallow the native realms, even if it is technically inferior, just because of the sheer inertia behind it.

In a way, Electron is a threat to the culture of the pure-native devs. Everything they know gets subsumed and disappears below the browser, and a horde of outsider devs come rushing into the native app space, with little awareness of the nuances of specific platforms and their communities.

View on HN

a horde of outsider devs come rushing into the native app space, with little awareness of the nuances of specific platforms and their communities.

The expansion of the industry means that those with little experience vastly outnumber those with plenty, and are highly incentivised to degrade the value of experience. That's why we see the explosion of new "frameworks", if it's only a year old then someone with one year in the industry on paper has as much "experience" as someone with 30. On paper.

That is why hardware gets faster and more reliable every year but software still gets slower and buggier. The HW side has somehow managed to keep this toxic culture in check, and their engineers, with experience on their side, are actually managing to advance their field, while the SW side keeps reinventing the wheel, a little squarer each time.

I've been working primarily in a web development context for about a decade now. I concede in a heartbeat that Electron is a vastly inferior user experience compared to native apps.

Earlier in my career, I worked primarily in a native development context. I concede in a heartbeat that Flash's buggy and insecure browser plugin was a vastly inferior user experience compared to the web standards we have now.

A platform's native tools are generally going to provide the best user experience. Mind you, they don't always provide the best DEVELOPER experience... so we're endlessly experimenting with new approaches and abstractions. But the pendulum always swings back around.

Perhaps you are not aware of it. I am not talking about electron. I am talking about react native. Emphasis on "native". Please look it up.

Ah, my bad. In that case, the performance concern might not apply, but the cultural concerns probably still do, to a lesser degree.

On the contrary, all the good langs have a js backend. Wouldn't you love to use purescript/haskell/Scala/ocaml for cross platform GUI apps? I know I desperately want such a thing :)

Oh yes, we're living the dream already. But the poor natives of the various environments, just can't convince us universalists to follow their customs, share in their libraries, unpack our stuff into the designated locations.

I mean, I'm fine with doing that for my favorite OS, but I'm not going to learn the details of everyone else's OS, not when I can ride above it all on a magic abstraction layer.

I have recently discovered that on HN, you can either downvote or reply, but not both.

What? Sure you can do both.

Well, I can downvote comments in different threads, but not in any threads that I am participating in. The down arrow is simply absent from those comments.

The only restriction I'm aware is that you can't downvote the direct replies to your own comments. Right now, I can downvote your original comment, but not your reply to mine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com