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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Which trend or advancement is being overlooked by most developers?

What is the most underrated movement that could have a real affect on software?

What are the majority not thinking enough about?

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

What are the majority not thinking enough about?

The efficiency of native desktop applications.

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

And feeling the need to support all Win7 8.1 10, OSx, Linux... nah, I will pass 😕

Supporting the 5 major browsers Chrome Opera Firefox IE Safari for a web app seems much easier for me.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

How is supporting five very different web browsers easier than supporting five different operating systems, given that you can use cross-platform libraries for both?

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

Given that any dll library needs an installer, and that can crash during installation. Or if a downloader like Adobe, internet connection might drops... the list goes forever.

I've done desktop apps developing. And the worst part is releasing and testing on various VMs, it's just ugly!

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

any dll library needs an installer

Not if they just reside in the application directory. On Windows, Qt software, for example, usually comes in a ZIP archive with a gazillion of qt-something DLLs. So do Electron "apps", by the way. :-)

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

gazillion dlls

The user needs to download a fat app in 2 mins... and in case of a website, just opens it in a 10 secs max

so do electron

And have a sluggish app like popcorn or gitkraken, what's the point of having a native app then 😄

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

The user needs to download a fat app in 2 mins... and in case of a website

..., there still is a gazillion of JavaScript bloat to download and parse - including security implications, unlike on the desktop.

what's the point of having a native app then 😄

That's why you should not use Electron.

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

It's okay for js, though I hate it, but the user gets the product up and running in less than 10 seconds which is incredible.

That's why I think web assembly is something... similar efficiency with no JS!

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

the user gets the product up and running in less than 10 seconds which is incredible.

... after having downloaded multiple 100 MB of Electron stuff. Sigh!

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

Who mentioned electron, it's a shitty tech... I meant normal web app with js.

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jfrankcarr profile image
Frank Carr

I'd say this is particularly important in certain environments where this efficiency is really needed. That would include a lot of stuff from gaming to manufacturing.

That's not to say you can't leverage both desktop and web applications. For example, a lot of the new stuff I'm working on (when not stuck in legacy town) uses web services for a lot of things but when I need to work with barcode readers, PLCs or scales, it has to be a desktop app running the show.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

I'd say this is particularly important in certain environments where this efficiency is really needed.

I guess the difference between us that I think that efficiency is always important. Wasting your resources for inefficient software will degrade your computer performance, kill more forests because of the additional energy needed ;-) and, even worse, make you wait. A computer is a tool. Inefficient tools need to be replaced by more efficient tools until you can't notice a difference anymore.

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tunaxor profile image
Angel Daniel Munoz Gonzalez

What's your take on universal windows platform apps regarding them as a desktop solution?

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

I'm not really keen on the design of UWP applications on devices without a touchscreen.

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qm3ster profile image
Mihail Malo

Yeah, it is definitely sad.
But desktops are overpowered.
When you can run games/creative, Slack et al can afford the ridiculousness of, say, Electron.

Mobile apps though? On a handheld battery?

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

Web components are a huge advancement in the web platform, but most devs hadn't heard of them.

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sergio profile image
deleteme deleteme • Edited

Do you have any recommended reading and tools to dive into this over the weekend? Thanks!

React is Tomorrow's MooTools

Scathing!

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

recommended reading

WELL...
There is this blog series everyone's talking about 😅

MDN is also amazing

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

Scathing!

Lol, I was going to write "jQuery" but i thought that wouldn't write capture the essence of the problem 😉

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

How would you respond to push back? (Mostly from the React community from what I've seen)

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Edited

In my humble opinion, the react community is too heavily invested in their library. I can understand that, given the runaway success of their library, but I do think the bubble will eventually burst. The wise developer will begin to sharpen their custom-elements-fu and should consider them for their next project.

React vs. Web Components is a False Dichotomy.

Since web components are browser standards, they are as usable within react components as divs are. There are some minor caveats surrounding custom events, due to the odd way that react works with the DOM, but there's a well-trodden cowpath for working around react's eccentricities on that front. Preact, by the way, largely mitigates those caveats.
Although it's my opinion that web components are technically superior to React components because they are natively supported by the web browser instead of requiring developers to fight the browser, there is actually no contradiction between the two.

React is Tomorrow's MooTools

React is quite popular today, it's true, but that might not always be the case. <span> isn't going anywhere, neither is querySelector, but we've seen plenty of library frameworks fall to the wayside. In the mean time, web components have gained traction in the enterprise world due to their obvious future-proofing benefits, and interoperability between browsers and libraries.

Today, Web Components are Widely Supported

Now that Firefox supports Shadow DOM and Custom Elements, and the Edge team has announced their intent to ship, the web component standards have truly arrived, and are a compelling feature of the platform. I don't think it's a coincidence that we've seen a lot of shade thrown on WC's on social media this past month. Now that the standards have landed it's a much more looming threat to all-js component models.

The FUD Around WC's is Unjustified

A lot of the react-world arguments against web components boil down to some variation on

  • The standards aren't accepted
  • They are hard to work with
  • They can't do what react does

But this is simply not true. The now-deprecated v0 standards are no longer supported, they've been replaced with the v1 standard, which as we've seen is widely supported.
While it's true that the low-level APIs described by the standards can be cumbersome, libraries and base classes like hybridsjs or lit-element smooth over those bumps with only a tiny addition to js page load sizes.
As far as features, web component libraries can do everything react can do and more without the VDOM overhead or the cognitive and tooling complexity added by that abstraction - Web component dev tools are browser/dom dev tools.

An Anecdote

I have a friend at a browser vendor. A few years back, his team was busy building browser UIs and features using react.js. Even as he praised the elegance of the one-way-data-flow-with-central-store architecture (now easily implemented with custom element base classes like GluonElement or LitElement and state containers like redux etc), he complained about the performance limits of the React JS library (his words). I suggested he check out web components, since with them the performance limits would be the browser itself, rather than a JS library. He shot off an IM to a coworker. It's a few years later and lo and behold, that same browser vendor is currently in the process of re-writing their UI components with their own web-component-based library.

Summary

React brought a lot of wonderful things to the web development community.

  • A Functional approach to UI
  • One-way-data-flow patterns
  • Popularizing the component model

But it also brought a lot of baggage with it.

  • FUD around working directly with the DOM
  • Cumbersome and unnecessary tooling
  • The popular misconception that react is the only way to do component-based UIs on the web

Today, you can factor a modular, component-based front-end app without any browser flags, build steps, bundling, or tooling other than the browser and a text editor. And it will run on all the major browsers.

It's clear to me that the future will be built on open standards rather than bespoke implementations. However much good React has done for the web community (and I hope I clearly recognized that good), it won't be able to compete with that.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Thanks for a really thoughtful reply!

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dan_abramov profile image
Dan Abramov

Figured I'd provide some response from the React side of things. :-)

dev.to/dan_abramov/comment/6kdc

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thepassle profile image
Pascal Schilp • Edited

I'd say there's really no reason for the bad blood, and frankly, to me it feels immature at times and ill-informed. You can still use WCs in your framework. Take a look at this: custom-elements-everywhere.com for example.

Another point: Say I'm developing something with Vue, and I want to use a React component that I remembered because I used it in a different project, you'd have to hope there's a Vue version of that component, or roll your own. A web component you'd just plug and play, no matter the framework.

If you want to use your framework because of whatever reason, you can still leverage web components. Or not. Whichever is fine. You do you.

Additionally; Standards tend to outlive frameworks.

 
rhymes profile image
rhymes

Nowadays it is, unfortunately.

Yep, I agree. I don't think this trend is going to revert anytime soon, at least in home computing.

A friend of mine for example, totally non technical, has been telling me she wants to ditch her Macbook Pro because she doesn't know what to do with it. She bought it two or three years ago and now she uses it mainly to watch TV shows on Netflix :D Her plan is to replace it with an iPad and maybe a keyboard for when she has to type emails or invoices.

If you don't work with a computer most of the stuff you do is through a browser already.

I think the vision of the personal computer that Bill Gates talked about ages ago is being fulfilled by personal smartphones / tables, not by desktop computers. Instead of having a family PC people have personal devices and share things with each other. Nobody looks at old photos taken with the smartphone anyway :D

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

So, actually, there are not "less people who need actual computers" but "more people who use alternatives". I agree that you won't need a real computer for consuming YouTube, but typing on a touchscreen is a mess. I admit that not everyone wants to type stuff like e-mails.

But we're on DEV, we usually write a lot. :-)

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

So, actually, there are not "less people who need actual computers" but "more people who use alternatives".

They use alternatives because they don't need them apparently :-)
Keep in mind that most adults have had to deal with a computer in their lives, the massive adoption of smartphones and tablets is a little more than 10 years old, they haven't been around forever. If after 12 years people are happy to use them less, then we must ask ourselves why.

Microsoft has a successful line of portable computers that look like tables when the keyboard is detached.

Apple for example has gotten a lot of flack in the latest years because their focus has been almost completely on phones.

A lot of people are happy with phones or with giant phones with pens or with iPads with keyboards or other combinations. Other people are happy with desktops or laptops. There are a lot more options now and it's a good thing.

It's not like computers have disappeared. They are there, you can buy them, both Macs and PCs. It's just that the "glory days" (in my opinion) are over

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

Apple for example has gotten a lot of flack in the latest years because their focus has been almost completely on phones.

Apple also sells a good couple of MacBooks though. Although I'm sure that macOS servers usually won't run from phones or laptops...

A lot of people are happy with phones or with giant phones with pens or with iPads with keyboards or other combinations. Other people are happy with desktops or laptops.

I have not said otherwise. But ignoring the second group looks wrong to me, especially since I'm a part of it. ;-) I guess that the tablet hype is over and they will fade into obscurity soon as "phones" grow bigger every six months and Microsoft's "tablets" are actually small convertibles.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Apple also sells a good couple of MacBooks though.

True, that's how powerful their brand is. They can change ports or ship shitty internal keyboards, people will complain for a while, but still buy the product :D

But ignoring the second group looks wrong to me

Agreed, but the second group is not totally ignored. You can still buy desktop apps for pretty much everything. See the App Store

I guess that the tablet hype is over and they will fade into obscurity soon as "phones" grow bigger every six months and Microsoft's "tablets" are actually small convertibles.

I hope they will not forever kill "smaller" phones, there's a limit on how phones can get big. I went to the Apple Store the other day and I can't use the iPhone XS Max with one one, to me that it's already too close to an iPad mini. I would be okay with the size of one of the other new phones but I've read about people complaining because phones are getting too big.

If I were an illustrator I would buy the new iPad pro in a heartbeat for example, but I'm not so it stays on the shelf :D

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

You can still buy desktop apps for pretty much everything.

Hasn't this discussion started with @ar10642 claiming that this was to be ended because "nobody needed that"? :-)

there's a limit on how phones can get big

Hmm. My first "smart" phone had four inches, my current one has six and I still wonder how I could live with the smaller one. I guess as long as it fits into my pockets, I'm fine. Luckily, I did not need a new one this year just yet.

people complaining because phones are getting too big.

Apple has been the one company that sticked with small screens for much longer than the competitors, so I can understand their overreaction now. I don't know whether I could use a 6.5" "phone" as my daily driver. I haven't tried yet. (But I haven't had an iPhone yet either. Hmm.)

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Hasn't this discussion started with @ar10642 claiming that this was to be ended because "nobody needed that"? :-)

Well, "nobody" is probably a hyperbole but I guess in a few years he'll be right ;-)

I guess as long as it fits into my pockets, I'm fine.

That's the limit right there :-) My criteria for now is: can I use this with one hand and can I reach the top of the screen with my thumb?

But I haven't had an iPhone yet either. Hmm.

Well, there are plenty of non-iPhones with huge screens :D The new OnePlus 6T is 6.4"

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

I guess in a few years he'll be right ;-)

Or I will, claiming that pure tablets will be gone by then. Ha!

can I use this with one hand

I have never used mine with one hand, except for reading the time. I probably use it wrong. :-)

there are plenty of non-iPhones with huge screens :D

My OnePlus 5T - the last good OnePlus device - has 5.99" to be precise enough and I guess my next one may be an iPhone, given that good Android devices become more limited and more expensive every year anyway. But this might be a separate discussion.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

I guess my next one may be an iPhone, given that good Android devices become more limited and more expensive every year anyway

Yeah, I think I'm going with an iPhone next. My current phone is a Nexus 5X with a 5.2" inch screen. Premium Androids are not that interesting anymore (maybe except the Google Pixel 3's camera) and I've only had bad experiences with Samsung phones.

But this might be a separate discussion.

yup

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

Lack of hard system limitations.
What? The advancement in storage, memory, network and CPU performance result in people creating unoptimized and bloated software. Wasting resources left and right. Usual excuse: there are plenty resources available (when you only run my software). Or people should simply upgrade their 3 year old device.
Just because I have a powerful system does not mean you can just consume resources as you see fit. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I don't mean you should optimize. Just keep the waste down. Electron is a good example of a wasteful stack for simple applications. You wouldn't use Eclipse's RCE for a chat application either.

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman • Edited

Programming with pure functions, sometimes known as Functional Programming. All that mathy stuff associated with FP is pretty cool for expressibility and reuse, but it pales in comparison to the value of just using pure functions for as much of the code as is reasonable. With pure functions testing is easy and refactoring becomes very low risk. (Thinking typed FP... not as familiar with untyped.)

This extends to the front-end as well. The Elm Architecture has really taught me a lot in this regard. We have done epic refactors of our code base, fixing early mistakes. And because Elm code is pure, it was a bit of work, but it wasn't risky.

Writing pure functions is an investment in the code base, but it returns big over time.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Writing pure functions is an investment in the code base, but it returns big over time.

Is it possible that the average dev shop is just too short sighted to really buy into FP?

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman

I don’t think it is short-sightedness as much as inertia. Even if you have felt the benefits first hand, writing pure functions can be really difficult with the tools/languages devs generally use. Most languages expect mutation as a foundational principle. Every line of code is expected to be a side effect. It is going against the grain to do otherwise. And the reason most of our tools are like this is just the happenstance of history’s unfolding.

So then once you resolve to use tools which normalize and expect pure functions, you then immediately have another crisis. You have no idea how to solve problems with pure functions. It’s just different at times.

So I think it is only natural that these difficulties prevent people from giving it a try. I only started to discover the benefits myself pretty recently in my career (6 years ago?). And it wasn’t until even more recently that I began to be able to articulate specifically how it helps.

Fortunately a lot of languages have incorporated functional features. So that helps toward the familiarity of solving problems functionally. For example C# LINQ is a significantly liked feature that is basically lifted straight from FP.

Anyway, i just think it’s hard to do in most of our tools. And changing tools plus learning different ways to solve common problems is too much change at once for most of our teams. It took me multiple tries. Maybe as our tools start to incorporate more FP ideas, as they seem to be doing, the barrier will get smaller.

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progrium profile image
Jeff Lindsay • Edited

Polyglotism. Systems thinking. Art of simplicity. Post capitalism. User empathy.

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy • Edited

Moral Responsibility; the counter point of the 'because we can' with the question of 'should we'. Software Engineers have a responsibility to the general public regarding how our creations are used. Like any other tool in history software can do good, improve lives, help the disadvantaged. But i can also be used for ill-will and nefarious reasons. What is our responsibility as creators to the public?

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

PWA and WebAssembly are two killer techs... but, people still prefer frontpage-like solutions 😄

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danwolfdev profile image
Daniel Wolf

iOS needs to stop intentionally lagging in support of PWAs

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thejoezack profile image
Joe Zack

It feels pretty intentional, doesn't it? I get that they want to keep people in the app store, but at this point it seems pretty hostile to their customers...and the web in general.

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

I hope so... but Apple is so greedy for their apple-store subscription 🤬

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aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel

CSS Houdini! So so so cool!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Elaborate?

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aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel

It will allow you to write JavaScript in order to make CSS more powerful -- it should also make it so that browser compatibility isn't an issue anymore. Here's more -- some features have started rolling out especially in Chrome's Canary and FireFox's Nightly

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

I'm so jazzed for this to land

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antonrich profile image
Anton

I've heard about it on fun fun function. Haven't yet looked into it.

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antonrich profile image
Anton

Ali it would be great to see a post from you about this technology.

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brianemilius profile image
Brian Emilius

Accessability. Time and again this one little thing is overlooked.
Raise your game; get your a11y on.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

What is the most underrated movement that could have a real affect on software?

Ethics in CS curricula

What are the majority not thinking enough about?

The implications of facial recognition software applied to a massive scale :)

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almenon profile image
Almenon

Live programming. Devs are stuck in a code-run-debug-code cycle, but it doesn't have to be this way. What if you could see the values of your variables while you program? Once you try it you realize just how slow normal programming is.

There's some very exciting work going on in this area - look at lighttable / quokka / wolf / algojammer / FoxDot.

I'm the creator of AREPL, a vscode extension for live programming in python. I'm convinced that live programming will be a big thing. It may not be my extension, or any of the things I listed, but eventually live programming will become popular, not just a niche theoretical concept.

 
tux0r profile image
tux0r

My web app doesn't need installing, can be shared with a link, works the same on any device.

..., will break with new browser releases, will have you regularly keep your precious shitload of JavaScript libraries up-to-date if you care about major security problems, will probably be not usable by blind/visually impaired users because screenreaders can't do JavaScript too well, will always look and feel like alien (= non-native) software, artificially limits your freedom in terms of design and resource usage, ... :-)

You can write cross-platform applications in modern languages, including "mobile apps", by the way. They'll be native.

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mrtnrdl profile image
Martin Riedel

Security. Most devs couldn't care less about the security of the applications they develop. SQL straight to the database? Hold my beer.
Sending strings with shell commands and allowing arbitrary code execution? Can't see where this should go wrong.

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antonrich profile image
Anton

Recent pattern I've noticed that JS developers overlook languages like Elm on the basis: "another language that compiles to JS". So they don't even give it a fare try.

But that argument is no longer valid because JS (es6+) itself compiles to JS(older js).

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