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Comment by Produce | Hacker News Reader

It's the other way round, hence web apps having, pound for pound, far fewer features than desktop apps. Getting a nice, usable UI working on the web requires a hell of a lot of low level work which has been abstracted away in the desktop GUI libraries for almost two decades. This whole thing reminds me of KDE4 - the foundation allows more interesting things but it takes a very long time before it's feature-complete.

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I think comparing the number of available features per "pound" of effort is a mistake. Features are a binary thing for a given project: either the platform does what you need, or it doesn't. What matters to me is the amount of effort needed per "pound" of relevant feature. And that's where, in my experience, JS has a leg up.

The other crucial argument, which was made in other comments, is that the advantage of JS is further multiplied by its cross-platform nature. Basically every device that matters supports it. I believe that makes the comparison to KDE4 slightly less relevant :)

>And that's where, in my experience, JS has a leg up.

I have to disagree with this. Creating a form which displays a list of users and another to edit their details is trivial in, say, .NET's winforms. With [PHP,Python,Whatever]/HTML/JS it's a comparatively painful exercise. No form designer, you have to worry about low level stuff like data binding, the default styling is too basic to be of use. It's a major step backwards, hence people being excited about Meteor (http://www.meteor.com/) - it's finally bringing back the RAD tools that we've been lacking for so long.

It is trivial as long as your assignment is trivial and supported out of the box. Also, .NET is a complete platform, while PHP/Python/JS are programming languages not frameworks. For example Cake, Django or Rails would [parhaps] be better comparison. Also RAD tools are generally, in my opinion, not as helpful on complex projects as they are for simple applications.

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