> * Users: Sure, use whatever language you want -- just make sure it compiles to Javascript, which is already the lingua franca of the web.
I don't think users are saying this and I don't think they care as long as it works.
I don't think users are saying this and I don't think they care as long as it works.
DOS as a tech stack is ludicrous (unless you're working in embedded/industrial scenarios, but hey, at least you can command a significant paycheck in exchange for that level of horrors).
A terminal user interface however? Absolutely not, particularly if your userbase often has literally decades worth of muscle memory. Banks, governments or travel agencies (see an example for Amadeus here [1]) live and die with the "legacy" TUI.
[1] https://servicehub.amadeus.com/c/portal/view-solution/832976...
The customers in this case feared change too much to accept anything that wasn't exactly what it was replacing. Which meant that there was no point in doing the work.
Now, the interesting question is, who gave the pushback. Particularly in government, change in the "status quo" is feared because it would force the really old ones to deviate from a routine they have been living for decades - they'd have to basically re-learn their jobs, all for a few years before retirement. Others don't want any kind of improvement because then the young people, used to modern technology, would go and run circles around them regarding productivity, which would impact the "oldtimer" careers negatively.
And in some rare high-stakes cases, the system is mission critical and any kind of deviation from the previous way of working can literally send people to prison or cause massive monetary damage. Here, everyone wants to keep the status quo in order to not awaken the beast, and the incentive grows really powerful when it's some old mainframe system with tons of undocumented implicit assumptions and edge case covers.
Government work in my experience is a whole bunch of negative incentives from all levels thrown into a blender.
This is an issue with the program management which is very common in government. They are too change averse even when change is necessary (to satisfy their own requirements in this case, the DOS box can't connect to the network but they want the system on the network).
My experience from informally inquiries shows that users value fast TUIs regardless of the experience they amounted. Even the young mainframe and (rarer) Clipper users I talk to report preferring these systems over newer, web-based ones.
As developers we should show some sympathy, but some of my co workers didn't see it that way. They complained about the old TUI, while they themselves preferred using a terminal for git and other tools that actually have most of the functionality that they need in a GUI
At least for git, I prefer a terminal as well. git is easy enough to shoot yourself in the foot when you're using it in a terminal, but git GUIs tend to abstract away so much for anything more complex than "git commit/push/pull" that it's even easier, and way harder to recover from.
Or Visual Basic and Windows XP
They are, however, implicitly saying it with the position that "I don't care as long as it works."
Javascript is available on every modern browser. It's not going away any time soon. Migrating to some other frontend language, no matter how demonstrably better it is than Javascript, is a Herculean effort. Actually, it's more of an Atlassian effort, since it would require practically an Earth-wide shift.