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Comment by snerbles | Hacker News Reader

It does reflect the priorities of the community, though.

PyQT's page is clearly written by a developer, with an emphasis on explaining the internals of the library. The author clearly saw no need to make it attractive. There is no long-term vision beyond the library itself.

While PyQT is navel-gazing, Electron's page is all about grabbing mindshare and establishing clout. It seeks to conquer the world and your desktop, and you're going to like it.

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As a developer, Electron's page shows their prowess in writing good front end code, which is really important. As someone who understands the basic concept of Electron, I want a product that demonstrates those competencies.

I get what you're saying, but "writes good web front end code" isn't on my list when I'm looking for a good Desktop development framework.

I think stuff like this is pretty tribal, which is OK, but we should confuse it with decisions made on technical or experience merits.

When the "good Desktop development framework" is primarily in javascript, it's a good signal.

There are a lot of counter-examples:

  - apache

  - lighttpd

  - v8

  - PostgreSQL

  - Linux

  - Go

  - ZeroMQ

  - any imaging library (libpng, libjpeg)

  - any compression library (zlib, xz, bzip2)

  - urxvt

  - vim

  - emacs

  - tmux

Basically none of these have good websites. When I'm looking for a CSS framework or like, UI tricks like scriptaculous then I think it's a good signal, but past that I really think there's no link here. Really "has a good website" means "someone who knows how to build good websites built one for this project".

I would expect that apache and lighttpd are hosted in their respective projects; linux is used to run linux.com servers, etc.

Sure because those are examples of what you can do with the tech. You can't really make a website with Qt, so using... PyQt's website as an example for evaluation doesn't make a ton of sense.

We shouldn't, but we will.

We're still savanna primates, and silly little things like technical merits aren't going to get in the way of sexy shiny. Projects that understand this fact will attract developers and flourish, and those that don't will languish in forgotten obscurity.

Is it really that good though, or is it just that a lot of design effort (and dollars) have been put into it? Just based on the quality of electron based applications I have used, I feel like this basically amounts to spending a lot of time polishing a turd. Why compliment or be distracted by how shiny it is?

As a developer consuming the PyQT API, explanations of internals have come in handy.

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