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The point I'm making is not "use short variables everywhere", it's that in this case, the verbose alternative is not "much more readable".

Abbreviating "element" to "el" or using "attr" instead of "attribute" (etc.) can significantly reduce noise in web client code. Everybody either knows what it means, or they shouldn't be editing the code in the first place.

They'll figure it out. They're a programmer, figuring things out is their job.

> The more software developers there are, the easier it becomes to automate the drudgery and toil of life.

By "easier", you must mean "cheaper", but I don't believe that at all. There are now more software developers out there than ever before, yet project costs are the highest they have ever been and failure rates remain high.

Software developers are preoccupied with creating problems for themselves, which they then get to bill clueless clients for. The more programmers there are (especially juniors), the worse it will be.

Also, don't assume people actually want automation everywhere. Automation means killing jobs. Managers don't want to fire, they want to hire - it boosts their ego. Employees don't want to get fired, when in doubt, they'll come out against more automation in their day-to-day tasks.

If the economy really needed way more programmers, their wages would go through the roof (across the country, not just in overpriced Silicon Valley) and even otherwise disinclined groups of people would go for it. As it is, the wages are commensurate with the effort required to learn the profession.

Of course, up to a point. The same goes for very long but extremely descriptive variable names. Hence, it is a tradeoff.

426.

Except there isn't any problem here whatsoever. Yes, it's coupled, but it doesn't matter. No, this kind of code doesn't scale. It doesn't have to.

The time you spent writing this comment was longer than what it took writing this code. Considering what kind of site this is, that code may work indefinitely. Or, if necessary, someone from the future will need to change that 3 to a 4 at some point. In terms of total cost, it's almost certainly the cheapest solution.

> It costs almost nothing more to write "event" instead of "ev" or "removeElement" instead of "remEl", but it makes the code much more readable.

No, it doesn't. Unless you're an absolute beginner, it takes you a couple of seconds to realize that in this codebase, "ev" (or "evt" or even "e") means "event". The same goes for "remEl". If that's consistent, then it's not a big deal at all.

Having less characters makes code more readable (or rather "scannable") as well, it's just another tradeoff.

> Its a good point, if you overlook the fact that the British destroying the Indian & Chinese economy (through war/invasion) created a vacuum for the US economy (British colony at the time) to flourish.

You're making some sort of moral argument, but the argument against protectionism isn't moral. Protectionism is stupid from an economic perspective, no matter if India or the U.S. does it. If there's a moral argument to be made, it's against protectionism: It denies citizens to partake in free trade and therefore makes them poorer.

What's in it for India if everyone has to use the (inevitably crappier) Indian version of Google, Facebook or Amazon? It's not like anybody outside of India is going to want to use that stuff, so it doesn't bring in foreign capital. It'll just reallocate local tech talent to a domestic market that is less profitable than the international market. It makes no sense.

That's exactly why people need to bring in emotions and hot words like "colonialism": To make a psychologically powerful (but irrational) case. It might just work.

> Never forget India was #1 in world GDP (for more than 1000 years) pre-invasion.

I'd be skeptical about estimates on GDP dating to 1000 A.D., but if there's anything to learn here it's that you should probably spend some of that GDP on defense, lest you get invaded by tiny-old Britain.

> Russia with Putin as its leader stands in the way of American domination of Eurasia. Hence, the military encirclement of Russia and the belligerent anti-Russian rhetoric from American leaders.

Is the US really dominating Europe and if so, is that not better than being dominated by Russia? Why did the Ukrainian civil war break out, wasn't it the desire of ethnic Ukrainians to break away from Russia? "Greater Russia" is a thing that many ethnic Russians want and Putin would take it if he believed he could get away with it.

Historically, if your nation bets against the US, you end up on the losing side. We're not going to be ever living in a world without major superpowers and the US - imperfect as it may be - is by far the best such "regime" that has ever existed in history. I'm worried about a world where the US retreats from that position, leaving it up to autocrats to divide the spoils among them.

Of course, if you're an international leftist, you're knee-deep in denial and resentment about the abject failure of every regime that ever challenged US hegemony. You crave some sort of justice that history will never deliver to you, defending some of the most oppressive countries in the world while maximizing and exaggerating the oppression at home. Cognitive Dissonance at work!

Having said that, the Democrats really need to move on from whining about the Russians interfering in the elections, it's just not effective.

Military people applying their experiences to company leadership are problematic, because they worked with a selection of people that doesn't reflect the general population.

In the general population, not everyone wants to be a leader, not by a long shot.

People tend to have a strong urge to avoid responsibility (and therefore making decisions), that's the whole point of having superiors. If everyone's fully responsible for what they do, they don't do their work.

Even an incompetent superior helps here, because at least in theory you can divert responsibility to them. It allows people do their work for the majority of the time when things don't go wrong. If they do go wrong, everyone gets to blame everyone else somehow, maybe the company tanks, but really life goes on.

You may point out problems here and there, but no other obvious alternative (like flat structures) are devoid of problems.

I'd be wary of solutions that take human responsibility completely out of the equation (such as AI). Sometimes a decision not made is actually for the best.

No, this is a permissions problem. Reading and writing to an application directory does not cause any issues until some code in that directory starts running with privileges it shouldn't have.

It should not be possible for an application that happens to install other applications to bypass the user for specific permissions. The user must be asked explicitly.

This has nothing to do with being able to "sideload" apps or not. Sideloading apps is actually possible on iOS, it's just such an effort (getting a developer account) that it's rarely done in practice.

That's not true. I'm sometimes faced with a lot of companies to choose from and if one of those companies has a badly designed logo, I'll immediately become suspicious of all of their other qualities.

On the other hand, a really good logo doesn't have the opposite effect, because I know some designer (or AI, whatever) made it for them.

I can't remember ever having been stunned by a logo.

The height of my experiences could be described as:

"Oh, nice logo." or "Hmm, clever."

The line between "clever" and "trying too hard to be clever" is also quite fine.

Some logos become iconic, but that has as much to do with the brand itself as with the logo. Even if Microsoft had the Nike logo, it would still be uncool.

So, a "feature" in the installer allows an already installed malicious app to install even more malicious apps.

That new malicious app then gets to somehow have more permissions than the original malicious app or the installer.

Guys, that's an Android bug. This is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be fixed at an OS level, you can't be relying on the competence of arbitrary developers to maintain the security of the system.

Of course it's an opportunity for Google to use their own broken security model as an argument on why apps should only come from their own "curated" channels (which presumably also host the malware exploiting this). It just so happens to be their source of revenue...

Do you realize that in Canvas colors are represented as a "series of text strings" that need to be parsed?

Did you know that drawing paths requires a ton of pretty expensive Javascript calls or alternatively passing "a series of text strings"? Maybe the string way is actually faster, I haven't tested it because it isn't supported everywhere.

Were you aware that vector rendering is not usually done on GPUs, mainly because of the high overhead of state changes when using a graphics API, especially one like WebGL?

I guess you could do all your rendering in software in Javascript (which for these purposes is nowhere close to what you can get with C/C++) to a byte buffer and then do the final transfer to Canvas. Even in that case, you might be surprised how much overhead that final transfer has...

> SVG is not a part of HTML 5, it is older

Maybe not formally, but making that distinction makes no difference to my point.

> Canvas is as fast as the now defunct Flash

...not even close.

> you're not telling us anything interesting

First of all, that's a pretty condescending thing to say and you're obviously not speaking for everyone. I wouldn't mention that if you weren't tone-policing me.

I'm telling you that if you make technical decisions based on "feature support" charts, you're going to fall flat on your face with WebGL. That's pretty useful information unless you never have to do any actual work with that technology, but then your opinion is also irrelevant.

> Knee-jerk disagreeing and suspecting everyone to have less experience than you will just get you downvoted everywhere.

Nobody who has experience with WebGL and SVG will say WebGL is better supported across the board. You'll have to take that at face value, there's no scientific study for it and I'm not going to just give out more information than I'm comfortable with.

I'm getting downvoted across the board here, presumably for using "bad" words like "terrible" to describe everyone's favorite Web technology they never really used. Or if they have used it, they don't know how poorly it compares to something "evil" like Flash. People want "the good guys" to win, which means "free and open source" and "standard". It makes them upset when somebody criticizes that harshly, but it's the reality.

I got some upvotes initially, by the way. Not that I care either way, I'm not paid in upvotes.

The difference in performance with Flash is huge, modifying the context is quite expensive, resetting it is expensive, which is problematic because it is stateful.

You have to compare it to non-Web technology to get an idea of how bad it really is. Compared to SVG/HTML, it's of course massively faster.

I have no idea what exactly you did, but I can't fathom how you would form such opinions from hands-on experience with both technologies.

You say things like "just export to HTML5 from Adobe Animate/Flash", but if you had actually used that, you would probably tell people to stay away from it, or at least acknowledge the caveats.

That's why I said "at least in terms of propaganda". Anything that's owned by the state is considered to be owned by (all) the people.

Venezuela also is not by definition a socialist country, it just has a socialist party whose goal is socialism. There still is a relatively strong opposition.

> In modern political discourse, democratic socialism and social democracy are considered interchangeable

Not at all, case in point: We are having a political discourse and people don't consider it interchangeable.

That's not a library, that's a demo and it takes several seconds to load, just like a flash applet would.

I'm aware of minimalist things that can put stuff on-screen instantly, but not of something that's a fleshed out solution like SVG or Canvas that still loads instantly (like SVG or Canvas).

Edit: I'm sorry, my brain was still in 2d/Canvas/SVG/Flash land, you were talking about 3D stuff all along. You're right threejs stuff can load quickly, shaders can become a bottleneck though. I was thinking of a library that basically does "Flash Lite" with good performance and yet remains competitive with Canvas/SVG content in terms of load time. I'm not aware of such a solution, but I'd be glad to learn whether it now exists.

Because mobile GPUs have terrible drivers that rarely get updated and browser vendors can't be bothered to deal with that combinatorial explosion.

Having said that, iOS isn't that bad.

Another opinion from someone who presumably looks at "browser support" tables and green checkmarks and forms an opinion that way.

How much actual WebGL vs. SVG development have you done? How many devices have you tested?

> Of course I have no idea, I'm only following the development of web technologies since IE6.

You followed other people doing the development at great expense. You're in no position to evangelize anything.

> Just pick a graphics library and you'll be fine if you want to move vector stuff around. If you miss the flash IDE, then it still exists and can export to HTML5 standards.

Hahahaha, yeah please use it. Please, I beg you. Use it and then come back and tell me it's just as good.

> I'm glad it showed us the way but it needed to be gone.

If it showed the way, people didn't quite see it, they went ahead with nonsense like SVG, which didn't work, so other people created Canvas, which still was massively slower than Flash. Just literally copying Flash would've been better.

The fact that a browser supports WebGL tells you nothing about which devices support it.

It all depends on the GPU and its drivers, browsers have blacklists of GPUs, but even if your device is not blacklisted, it may simply screw up, especially on mobile.

> We have all the features flash had now (and had it for many years now)

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, yet you're evangelizing HTML5, that's the problem.

Talk to somebody who tried to bring Video or 2D(!) animated content over from Flash to the Web. It was (and remains) a total clusterfuck. Not just because of performance but because of compatibility. Flash just worked. Web video or (god forbid) WebRTC are still problematic.

That's not to say that I want Flash back, but ignoring that it was proprietary, it was the better technology.

Dude, this is the kind of stuff I could run in realtime on an Amiga. Maybe not at the same resolution, but the resolution isn't the bottleneck in this demo either, I'm struggling to hit 40Hz at any scale.

It's not a "3D engine", it's basic line and shape drawing.

With SVG, you will easily run into the same performance issues with any kind of dynamic content, 3D or not.

With Canvas, you may or may not run into them, depending on how much content you have.

In either case, performance is terrible compared to what you can do in a native application.