Electron is not a sensible trade off. It is not necessary to accept that level of inefficiency to get that productivity boost. It only has happened that way because our industry has been so web focused for so many years, that very little brain power has gone into cross platform desktop apps for a long time.
And we end up with a ridiculous Frankenstein solution that is fractally wrong. But it is "Easy" because 90% of programmers are used to HTML,CSS,Javascript and so they can suddenly make 'desktop' apps now.
And no, we don't have a choice when almost every desktop application being made now is being made in electron. Its just awful, and you should quit dismissing the people telling you how much they hate the situation, its real.
And of course those of us that hate it should be aiming to help fix the situation, but of course it is difficult, since anything you propose that is not HTML/CSS/Javascript seems alien to so many modern programmers that they reject it out of hand.
> It only has happened that way because our industry has been so web focused for so many years, that very little brain power has gone into cross platform desktop apps for a long time.
While there is an ongoing trend to move towards web apps, I think you are mixing up the causality here a little bit. The main reason why developers are increasingly choosing to move towards web technologies for UI is the sheer pain of doing any kind of cross-platform development on the desktop.
Most of the nice desktop development frameworks (like the ones in C# or Swift) are not cross platform. Meanwhile, we have a decent cross-platform UI framework in Qt, but this requires dealing with C++, which doesn’t even have a good package manager behind it. You could also use GTK+, wxWidgets, FLTK, but these don’t provide a good look and feel and non-Linux OSes.
Basically if you want to easy-to-use cross-platform desktop UI development, your choices boil down to Electron, and maybe pyQt.
Desktop developers have years to make this a better situation by perhaps promoting cross-platform UI standards or building better tooling, but nothing good has really gained much traction, so more developers are justifiably moving to Electron for now.
The reason the causality sounds backwards is the GP is talking about secondary effects of what you are talking about — the other half of a vicious cycle.
We are already a decade into neglecting native app technologies in favor of web app technologies, because web apps were much easier to write and deliver than cross-platform native apps (and largely still are). It’s to the point where even big companies with lots of resources are hiring web programmers and web designers to build their UIs.
It’s interesting to me that mobile changes the trade-offs. The quality gulf between web and native apps is greater. The web sucks more on mobile, and expectations for native apps (animations, touch, etc) are higher. Mobile OSes also make it much easier for users to install and manage native apps than it is on desktop (because of the app store, no custom installers, no users locked out of installing apps by their employers as far as I know). I’m excited about React Native for addressing the cross-platform part.
We’ve learned since Java that even if you don’t have “write once, run anywhere,” you can still have “learn once, write anywhere,” a la React. Also, we expect apps to come with their own systems of UI widgets these days, not necessarily “native look and feel.” It really changes the game.
Claiming that everyone is worse off because electron apps consume more resources then they would had they been written in a "native" language is only true if the only value you get from an app is low resource consumption.
(I use native in quotation marks because we can probably not even agree on what that is.)
This attitude seems to be common here but everyone hating on electron seems to ignore any positive aspects of it and only focuses on the fact that it is slower and/or more resource intensive then had it been written in <native-language-of-choice>.
You can dislike Electron on a technical or principal level, that's fair, but until there is an alternative that would be considered better by most things will simply not change.
Until then, repeating the negatives over and over again only serves to de-value the efforts of those actually producing and shipping code and the only possible outcome is another "tabs vs spaces" holy war.
As an industry forum for engineers and people developing products, this is a great place to share positive and negative opinions about technology and how it impacts product quality. That’s good conversation.
Generic reactions to negativity, saying there are two sides to every coin, do not really contribute to the discussion, IMO, so I disagree.
Electron is not a sensible trade off. It is not necessary to accept that level of inefficiency to get that productivity boost. It only has happened that way because our industry has been so web focused for so many years, that very little brain power has gone into cross platform desktop apps for a long time.
And we end up with a ridiculous Frankenstein solution that is fractally wrong. But it is "Easy" because 90% of programmers are used to HTML,CSS,Javascript and so they can suddenly make 'desktop' apps now.
And no, we don't have a choice when almost every desktop application being made now is being made in electron. Its just awful, and you should quit dismissing the people telling you how much they hate the situation, its real.
And of course those of us that hate it should be aiming to help fix the situation, but of course it is difficult, since anything you propose that is not HTML/CSS/Javascript seems alien to so many modern programmers that they reject it out of hand.