All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript? | Hacker News Reader

All apps should be native. Who needs browsers and JavaScript?

thehackerati.com

17 pointsdzkanner23 comments

As I downloaded the economist app to listen to economist articles today, I felt the exact opposite of this article...

1. Won't be able to link to any article to friends unless the app maker decided to implement specific "share" functionality. Unlike a link that I can email, text, store in a file...

2. Oh and even if they have made this share functionality, it may not work on my friend's non-iPhone device. Even if I decided to share this with myself, I may not be able to consume it on my Mac.

3. Can't open multiple articles/audios in different tabs unless the app writer specifically took the time to make a multiple views interface

4. I'll have to wait 8 months before I can view this data on my iPad, because the co made the 100% reasonable decision to ship iPhone only first. I much prefer being completely incapable of viewing this data on one of my devices than a possibly less than ideal rendering of a web page with it on every platform I own.

5. Almost certainly can't group media in terms of topic, since the top level view is always going to be "app". So no collection of research bookmarks, just everything lost in their little provider's containers...

6. And the bonus is I now have to worry about the right place to organize this stupid app on my screen since I can't just keep a link to the data I care about.

I don't think hes argueing of the whole web.. hes talking about javascript. Eg websites that could and perhaps should be apps. This is different from a website that provides information.

The author of this completely neglects that the browser is not just an app runtime -- it was also originally (and still is) a knowledge source to download information. Where do I go when I want to find out the Seahawks' 2014-15 schedule? Research information about my car to make a DIY repair? The browser as an app runtime is a relatively new development IMO and webpages are still very important.

Alex later admitted to some exaggerations and mistakes after being scolded by Eddy.

See the response: http://www.thehackerati.com/blog/2014/07/22/in-defense-of-br...

@Dang, I think this is a poor article without a strong central argument and I fear any discussion it generates will be vapid and pointless. Is that proper criteria for flagging it? Or should I trust the algorithm and let it do its job?

> as I mature as a programmer I continually see JavaScript as a pretty awful language for real programming

Not sure what the author means by "real programming". Is this opposed to "fake programming"?

The more I mature as a programmer, the more I appreciate JavaScript's flexibility & readability. This allows for some useful idioms to manage complexity on large & intricate codebases. I like these dynamic idiomatic architectures as they tend to be flexible, evolvable, & under complete control of the programmer.

A module system (like commonjs) helps as well.

---

Meta note: Both this article and http://www.thehackerati.com/blog/2014/07/22/in-defense-of-br... seem like simple conversation starters.

Fake Programming: Using hacks and tricks to achieve things other languages have natively.

Though anybody will admit it's some pretty clever stuff, not many seem to look at things like this and recognize it for what it is.

Javascript's not the language rife with proprietary bullshit anymore, it's become something a bit more new: a hacked together super-language. Stick thousands of brilliant people on one unfortunate platform together and it will be inevitable.

So perhaps it's "not real" because I can't do it without requirejs. Maybe we'll appreciate it when you can do what Sass does in a .css file. So what if you can OOP, FRP, MVP, P its got a vast supply of crud-you-should-never-use.

I tell you one thing, though: I'd really love to rewrite everything I've ever done into Objective-C.

Who doesn't?

Right now, browsers are the easiest platform where you can build an application that can be made available to a lot of different devices. And when it's a requirement, from a time-to-market point of view this is a huge benefit. And this should be taken seriously into account especially now that people tend to use 2 or 3 devices every single day.

On the other side, from application point of view both the browser and the operating system are containers that offer some sort of API to interact with the user, the device and other resources. I wouldn't say that one has to be necessarily better than the other, it depends on the goal of the application.

So, you don't like the Javascript language, therefore web sucks? I'm no big fan of Javascript myself (so I'm gradually switching to Dart), but really, that's a lousy argument. Web is essential. Some apps are better be implemented natively, true. But most don't need that. And it's a great win for developers too, so you don't have to re-implement stuff for different platforms.

I'm not even sure the author is being serious at this point.

I think it's fair to say that some of his points are either hyperbolic or should be reasonably interpreted that way, but given that all the perceived flaws in javascript are essentially allowances for the original perceived purpose of the language (being a lightly used logic layer in the browser that was highly error tolerant), it not longer makes sense to us JS when you're building out massively complex apps that in a business sense need to be nearly/possibly-totally error free.

It would be nice to see a kind of pseudo-browser platform that served as a casing for generic apps that you could write in server-side languages clearly you lose some flexibility from doing that in terms of fault tolerance but many apps these days have a business case where fault tolerance is already so low it doesn't matter.

IMHO performance wise it is possible to get browsers to run apps at similar user experience level in the coming years, but the main problem with making HTML5 apps for cross platform is that each platform has unique capabilities and user expectations that one single app's UI/UX cannot satisfy.

On one end you have google trying to popularize Chromebooks and on the other you have this guy trolling his office with the notion that we don't need a decoupling between the personal OS and the interweb OS anymore.

The rise of "apps" on the smartphone is a validation of this idea. Why is there a Facebook app, when it can provide no information without an internet connection - for example.

The real message seems to be that we still have very poor default security models for desktop OS's.

OK. Can you make android apps run on my Windows laptop?

This is totally possible via the Android Runtime on Chromebook demo at Google IO.

Sorry but don't agree at all. Web will continue to be mostly uncensored while content in app store will always be be closely censored.

Let's not forget the commercial aspect. For SaaS business with a subscription model, you end up paying 30% to Apple/Google.

Creating a top app for iOS and Android? Ionic.

Creating a top game for iOS and Android? UnityScript.

Javascript rules.

This post was killed by user flags.

I'm pretty new to HN and am not sure why the post was killed. I was looking forward to an interesting debate on the value of browsers vs native apps. Can you please give advice for how to avoid being flagged while stimulating interesting debate? Thank you for the help.

I can't speak for the flaggers, but perhaps some of them will explain.

A good debate would be useful. Good debates don't generally start off with "Browsers suck". I found little of true value in this post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com