Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

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> focused on developers

The problem with this is which developers? People who write embedded systems? Web developers? People who write custom Windows applications?

Any given developer subset is likely to find this hypothetical new developer computer to be either too complex to use or not differentiated enough from Windows or MacOs (or ChromeOS).

> Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps

This is not true for most people whose primary employment is writing software, or working on software teams. Most people who get paid to write code work primarily in either the Java or .NET ecosystems and use something like Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Visual Studio. (Many more are using niche-specific tools in a captive platform like Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, etc.) If the new platform doesn't have 100.0% binary compatibility with legacy tools written for Windows and/or MacOS, its addressable market shrinks substantially.

I would also argue that focusing on developers too much is actually a loss for users. Developer productivity above all is how we've ended up with resource hogs like Chrome and Electron as well as never-ending erosion of customizability in software as well as the user's level of control and privacy.

It's critical to have a great developer story yes, but to make a stellar platform that needs to be balanced with a great user story, and that means developers might not always get everything they want down to the letter.

Agree to disagree. Java is inherently cross platform. Jetbrains stuff runs on any linux platform, as does vscode and any of the modern development workflow stuff. The development stack is steadily moving away from native apps. Vscode is essentially a webapp, and indeed it can run be run as one.

Fair enough about Jetbrains!

VSCode is not the entire stack needed to build Windows desktop applications. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of developers who build applications for the Windows desktop. I'm not (for the most part) a .NET dev, but my current understanding is that only Visual Studio running on Windows is a first-class citizen with the ability to access all parts of the dev stack. The Windows dev stack doesn't need to move away from native Windows applications any more than does Xcode need to move away from MacOS.

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