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Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Dropping in with a brief note that you should please, for the love of god, not name your product after the plural of a common noun. “Shoes is a popular framework” makes my brain hurt.

Nowadays is there any reason why you would do something like this instead of standing up a local devserver and delivering the gui via HTML? After using textual for a few months I’ve become pretty anti-gui for small local projects - web is just infinitely more mature and extensible than any little framework.

But maybe I missing the point?

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The web is also rather complicated to set up and run.

A simple binary that one builds or downloads and runs is often far simpler than setting up VPSes, SSL, and so forth. And typically "web" projects are ran on complex setups where one needs the right runtime, a database, some weird bundling/dependecies step (that breaks after a few months).

Shoes has the same problems of a fickle runtime and flakey bundling step as Rails, Django, Laravel,Express and whatnot have. So it's a bad example.

But a single statically built go or rust binary is just so much easierto runthan hosting any web-app.

All very fair! I guess I was thinking of the small CLI-related usecases that this is a more natural fit for. Writing a little monitoring gui for your program, making a few graphs from local files, etc. In that context I see web only requiring one-command startup (ie `npm start`), maybe two if you want a database. And then you have the entirety of the internet to steal from, rather than just the other Shoes/Textual devs.

Long story short, I think your answer is a great consideration of typical modern web servers, but I was suggesting the use of the protocols in a more unusual way. Namely, writing web programs that you don’t intend on ever publically hosting

> “Shoes is a popular framework” makes my brain hurt.

It’s a matter of getting used to. Note that Rails is an even more popular framework.

One of my biggest gripes with Ruby (probably after the abuse of `method_missing` to add unsearchable method invocations) has got to be the naming of packages. I have no data to back this up so I might be off-base, but in my decade-plus of working with the language I have many memories of becoming frustrated because I couldn't remember a library's name or couldn't immediately figure out the function of a library I found in a Gemfile or an import. This is absolutely a problem with all modern package-oriented languages, but for whatever reason I perceive Ruby as having the worst case of it of all the ecosystems I've used.

I'm afraid everyone does this, I did java for a while and I still don't know what "Catalina" is and how it related to Tomcat.

Do you remember what was the name of that library? What name would you prefer instead?

An example: nokogiri. Something like “libxml-sys” would be more obvious.

I see your point.

At the same time Nokogiri for me has more character. It feels justified too, the gem is everywhere and it’s very useful.

Also, since this is one of the most popular ruby gems, it’s hard for me to imagine that a rubyist would forget what this gem is about.

Plus, there is already a “libxml-ruby” gem. I like having library names that are distinct.

But yes, ruby does indeed have a lot of names like Nokogiri, (or Capybara, or VCR, etc).

I shared this view and built my partner a little web app to use for aggregating peer reviews for her students. It worked fine for a couple years until she had to go on maternity leave and hand it over to her replacement while she was gone. Due to data/privacy concerns it couldn’t be easily publicly hosted. It ended up being simplest to wrap it up as a Tauri App (coincidentally also on the HN front page right now) and distribute it that way. It’s now being used by a few people and I never have to worry about keeping it operational or losing/leaking data.

I guess in some ways I still went with your suggestion since it’s an html based gui, but local apps make data ownership way less problematic and are the right choice sometimes.

Great great example! Yes I was referring to exactly this - still making a local app for privacy/complexity reasons, but using html for the actual GUI. Will look into Tauri, never heard of it…

Ironically, it's a library for use with "ruby"... Common nouns are fine. Just need a little qualification for search "ruby lang", "shoes ruby gem"?

I think the issue is the grammar of it. “Shoes is” instead of “Shoes are”.

"James is" instead of "James are".

All those people with names ending with "s" make my head hurt. Curse you James, Chris, Thomas, Charles and all the others with their fancy and exotic names!

Seriously, proper names are fine to end with "s" as their isn't really a meaningful plural form. Shoes is used as a name here so "Shoes is" is grammatically correct.

Yes it is grammatically correct, but it is linguistically and aesthetically an attack on my delicate sensibilities. To me it sounds less like “James is” and more like “jameses is”. A framework is one individual thing, naming it after a plural noun is a weird juxtaposition. Like naming a kid “jameses”, or a dog “rovers”.

Plus “shoe” would be an AWESOME name for a framework! Missed opportunity…

Cli is fine when cli is fine, and not when it's not.

Web is fine when web is fine, and not when it's not.

When is a gui app better than either cli or web? Sometimes.

> But maybe I missing the point?

maybe! coding can be playful and computers are for everyone.

https://github.com/whymirror/why-archive/blob/master/shoes/n...

https://imgur.com/a/GeZUEh6

> web is just infinitely more mature and extensible than any little framework.

> But maybe I missing the point?

I'm just looking at WhatsApp taking 150% CPU (plus 30% from a whatsapp helper) and ruining my laptop's battery.

This is the "infinitely more mature" future you want.

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