The problem with Electron | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Electron

medium.com

4 pointsenkiv22 comments

> Javascript is just a basically-ordinary scripting language, and isn’t inordinately terrible (or even Perl-levels of terrible). It’s not great, but it’s OK, and that’s good enough for lots of people.

I'll take issue with that. JavaScript is a broken language, but where it falls on the broken-languages continuum isn't the problem: the fact that JavaScript exists is the problem. Web pages shouldn't be executable code; they should be documents. The world should have a universally-understood programming language, of course, but that language isn't JavaScript (IMHO it's Lisp, but perhaps some folks would make an argument for Scheme, others for Smalltalk & others for ML).

> The problem with Electron is that browsers are terrible at literally everything.

Completely agree here. With apologies to Gene Spafford, a web browser is like is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea - massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

> It’s easier to write a simple GUI app with GTK when you don’t know GTK than it is to write the same thing as a web app when you’re already a pro at writing web apps.

I suspect that's true. Getting a few tiny things working in the web stack is easy — getting a full app running properly is … obtuse.

I agree that web pages shouldn't have executable code. I think that's a separate issue from whether or not, given that web pages already have it, javascript is a reasonable choice. It's also a separate issue from whether or not live-editing ASTs for rich text is an appropriate GUI layer for javascript.

Basically, to the extent that web tech is acceptable at all, it has no interactivity. HTML and CSS aren't particularly good even as representations of static rich text, but they are far, far worse as graphics toolkits.

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