Hacker News Reader

Comment by easrng | Hacker News Reader

Why hasn't desktop dev evolved to be more like web dev? The tooling for web as a developer is vastly better, and as a user userscripts and extensions are wonderful. The closest thing to those for native is Frida I guess, and that's not really comparable.

View on HN

In 1995 I could write a GUI app that processed incredibly complex datasets (even for today, although smaller in total size since my hard drive was 40mb). Drag and drop controls onto a page, and even if I wrote my own control population logic, I was done in hours.

Try that with web dev. It’s sad that it’s not better - but it’s not better.

There's no good drag and drop builder, but I can absolutely make a working, decent-looking webapp in an hour.

A drag and drop builder would certainly lower the barrier to entry for those of us not [necessarily wanting to be] familiar with every single detail of how CSS / HTML / JavaScript work.

We just want a pretty app to demonstrate our backend.

Could your 1995 application be used by everyone on every system in a tap/click ?

I can't speak for 1995, but a bit later Java run equally bad on every platform and Qt run almost almost natively pretty much everywhere and with great tools to assemble UIs.

In my opinion web provides a developer experience that is a lot more enjoyable than Java and Qt can do for user interfaces. I have to admit that I only did small projects on Java and Qt frontends, but it was not very nice.

Qt needs to be adapted and compiled for every platform, it takes time and efforts and it's not interesting. And making a good frontend in Java is hard, I can't think of any Java application with a good frontend.

What about IntelliJ? Though some would say it is a bit "not lightweight". But it does have a lot of features.

It’s not a very impressive user interface. It works as an IDE but I would not show it to non developers as an example of a good Java user interface.

Multi platform with web isn’t easier than native OS

Whole lot of sites suck on mobile, not all devices have the grunt

Write once run anywhere continues to be a pipe dream

Also none of my desktop apps track me or blast me with ads

This is just about the GUI too; I can install a CLI only setup, and do science, infrastructure, and avoid the web framework or OS GUI bloat…

There’s no one size fits all anywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com