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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Sure, jumps like that are not as bad as you might think. Style wise the code is often poor, but users don’t really care about the code.

I started with Object Pascal on Mac OS 8/9 which forced you to do a lot of low level tasks like deal with Handles and suffer through a cooperative multithreaded OS. Rewriting the network layer from AppleTalk to TCP/IP was closer to systems programming in C than you might think.

I have also been paid to write C programs, Windows application pre .Net in Visual C++ and post in C# and VB, written Java and C# websites, and most recently Angular SPA’s. Add to that a few random oddities like XSLT.

PS: I even turned down working on Android, but could have made that jump.

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The jump is huge. Web development has a completely different model than mobile development. In web development, losing a connection is a failure case. Developing for mobile it is expected. Especially for enterprise apps. Logic is usually distributed, syncing is required, knowing which is the source of truth etc.

This is really an example of hiring someone who has experience and hiring someone who thinks “it’s easy and just like what I did before”.

Then I could get into all of the old netops guys who think AWS is just like what they did on prem and end up costing the company more...

They are different, but I don’t think networking is one of the major differences.

Website backends often have significant dependence on other services that can be down. Further standalone apps can have zero network dependence or a lot. So having written both, and similar code for each, I don’t feel the networking side is all that different.

If anything networking is probably the largest similarly between them.

PS: I did some iOS development in my spare time even worked with some old J2ME, so I assume Android is fairly similar.

>In web development, losing a connection is a failure case.

That's changing with the advent of progressive web apps. It's possible to write web apps now that are robust in the face of network problems, e.g., the web app renders and is functional even without a connection.

I’m not questioning whether you can do it with web technology. But you still have to design it where both your business logic and your data can live on the device and it can queue submitted data until there is a connection available and if multiple people are updating the same record, knowing how to merge the information or knowing which one takes precedence. I’ve even seen cases where the logic depended not on just the record, it depended on knowing which fields were updated by the device when it was disconnected and the prior value of the field to make sure that the user had seen the most recent value before they updated it. If not, someone on the back end had to do a “manual merge conflict resolution” by calling both people.

You frequently encounter similar issues between multiple web servers. Either due to scaling to multiple data centers or when multiple independent services all update the same information. This can get really complex when clients start talking to multiple different services.

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