There seems to be a constant in all of these “towering piles of shite” articles: they’re all talking about frontend development. My own experience concurs. I wonder why that is.
A good (read: native) and well-architectured desktop app probably has more in common with backend development, UI design aside!
It's not unfair to group client dev together. Client dev is always hard. People on HN who only have touched JS dev tend to think that JS clients are uniquely hard and, presumably, that clients are a cakewalk to build on other platforms/sdks.
Never was true. Just look at the Android dev comments ITT. It's all hard and complex.
I mean that it always seems to relate to things with graphical interfaces. To be clear, I don't doubt it's possible to create well-architected things with GUIs.
The alternative is to deal with computers how they naturally "want" to be talked to. Then life is simple, you just need _engineers_ to write the software, and to _train_ people to use it.