I'd like to suggest an edit to two kinds of programmers: There are programmers that care about the quality, elegance, and beauty of their code, and there are programmers who just want to make the most people happy as fast as possible. Fine dining vs fast food.
> programmers that care about the quality, elegance, and beauty of their code
this seems less like fine dining, and more like a fancy kitchen. this is much more about the chef (though there are possibly secondary effects for diners).
There's a difference between writing maintainable code and premature optimization. Experience is knowing the difference between you can and you should.
It is easy to talk about premature optimization in a world like ours; the hardware industry spits products twice as fast and generous in regards to memory every three years or so, to keep up with software designed by programmers who think likewise. You just replace your two-year old laptop with 4GB of RAM---which became unusable all of a sudden because now it keeps hitting virtual memory, which is I/O expensive---for one with 8GB of RAM.
If you consider hardware is a commodity and the cost of opportunity for replacing hardware instead of optimizing software is worth it, then formulate it better.
One may object by saying that the burden on hardware resources is higher because we consume more data, which is partially right. Although I don't intend to give a thorough objection here, please consider those two points:
- The payload fraction is larger in multimedia applications, for sure, but I can't see a reason why the "propellant mass fraction" equivalent in software should be bigger than it was, for example, 10 years ago. If we consider text-only data as an example, we notice that the propellant mass fraction increased as well.
- Higher level languages undeniably consume more resources by orders of magnitude; hardware frequencies must keep up by orders of magnitude as well.
The desktop is a dying platform, and if you're on it you can probably afford the overhead. From a global perspective if you're after accessability you'd be targeting the web and android. Both of which lend themselves nicely to react/react-native. And if you already have this architecture you can package it for desktop basically for free and integrate with the needed platform features that way, along with an upgrade strategy if you use react-native for OSX/Win.
Why would a tech company not build its flagship product natively on the platforms where it runs? It seems like a generation drift: an obliviousness to the world outside of JS/web dev, and a general disregard for application performance.
Put simply: time to market. Experienced front-end devs with a designer on hand could put together the UI inside of a day, with a workable user experience.
Hell, if you're not afraid of bloating in the codebase, you could use a large number of libraries to put together a basic, working version inside of a day or two. Stretch that to a couple of weeks (at most) and you have a prototype you can release.
The proof is in Atlassian and Microsoft chasing after Slack on this. Very few people came forward to wave the "Let's just go back to IRC" flag.
It's shiny, new, you can drag and drop gifs and files into it, and it runs pretty swiftly (ignoring all of the obvious flaws). Most, especially less technical, users would find it a charm to work with. In my experience, they do -- and above all of the competitors.
The rest of your points are rather valid. But maybe its not so much obliviousness, as eagerness and impatience, and the reality of the market being as timely and pressing as it currently is. It's a race -- just like the telephone and the radio (for my point I'm ignoring the scale of impact here).
That's the problem right there(?). People bringing a DOM to the desktop because the developers were fluent in JS.
> time to market
If there were no drawbacks in terms of complexity/performance/size etc then I'd agree, but now when you have a perf issue that is too large it might be a huge issue to fix. You also only get one chance for a first impression - and poor performance is a huge turnoff. Looking blingy and having all the features doesn't save an app with a 200ms lockup. or a 10% CPU at idle.
Agree, I think this is a combination of lack of imagination by developers who only know JS, and management who has bought the myth that cross platform development is 3x faster than making native apps.
I saw this happen at work. My team were all experts on native mobile development. We could crank out stuff fast, because we knew our tools well. But then some management dude got the idea that we would do it 2-3x faster if we went with JavaScript.
Turns out it was more like 2-3 slower than making all the native versions, because we did not have strong experience with these tools and APIs were more limited, poorely documented, buggy, and the tools were subpar.
because they don't need to. Our phones and computers aren't where they were 10~15 years ago. The end user doesn't even notice if an app is native or running in Electron.
Given that constraint, time to market becomes crucial as the huge cross platform barrier is significantly reduced by Electron.
It's also a demographic shift. Young developer's aren't coding in Java peak world anymore. We haven't even reached peak Javascript yet.
Definitely a demographic shift. And maybe business smart: cheaper to hire and onboard web devs etc. But that doesn't mean the company and its product shouldn't be critiqued for its architecture (even more so because it is a software company).
> I can see someone is downvoting comments that doesn't agree with time to market being an important driver in influencing architectural decisions. This is someone who is very mature and well seasoned in Java architecture.
Ah yes. Someone who downvotes you, which you assume to be about the time to market comment of your argument, must naturally be a person "who is very mature and well seasoned in Java architecture".
What does that even mean to be "well seasoned in Java architecture"?
A very vulgar response. I've heard it put in less stupid terms by other rightists. Although I've never heard a native New Yorker complain about rent control, regardless if they're rich or poor
Not everyone is happy paying several times the rent of their neighbors, just because they were there first.
We're also not really happy that a lot of the housing is slum-quality, since landlords generally want their tenants to move out and the law obliges them to make sure the guy paying $3000 and the guy paying $500 are equally miserable.
The building that I currently live in in Manhattan was taken out of rent regulation (stabilization) with my lease. It's a well managed elevator building from the 70s. I'm perfectly fine paying several times more than some of the building's remaining old timers whose rents only go up 2-3% per year. My rent actually only goes up 4-5% per year. The only difference between the regulated units and mine is what would happen if the building changed owners. If a new landlord came in and was less interested in long-term quality tenants, they could dramatically raise or double my rent every year, finding newer, richer, dumber tenants -- as long as the market would tolerate it (and with the national and international interest in new york, it would). The regulated units meanwhile would continue to only raise at 2-3% per year.
I'm a rent-controlled tenant in a beautiful apartment building on West 55th Street. My rent is low, but not obscenely so.
I lived here through the hard times when the neighborhood was shitty and filled with derelicts, winos and prostitutes.
We all kept the building clean and nice. We lived in the building when _nobody wanted to live here_. We chased out the crooks who used to try to mug people in our elevator and kick open doors. The landlord made improvements to the building because the way the rent control law is designed, _they have to_ to get rent increases.
And we're still here and a great tenant and great neighbors.
Oh and of course the landlord has been trying all sorts of illegal means to get us (and the single-digit handful of other controlled tenants, 100+ unit building) out - and regularly gets verbally slapped around by a judge in housing court. It's a good thing we held on to hold on to _all of our records related to being in this apartment all the way back to 1970_...because we had to.
You might have a good job, but it's probably not good enough for a decent life in New York. Either that, or you just don't know how to find quality housing in your price range. It's not easy for out of towners the first few years. Lots of mistakes :) This is one of the most desirable cities in the world. It's not the rent-stabilization that makes the city less than affordable for you.
> It's not the rent-stabilization that makes the city less than affordable for you.
First, this is a fallacy: in economics, things usually have multiple factors. In regards to whether rent policy is a significant factor on housing affordability for newcomers, people who study this for a living are in almost universal agreement that you're wrong.
Yes, the <1.8% of us with _actually low_ rents (most stabilized apartments aren't nearly that low) are the reason you can't get an affordable apartment.
Keep dreaming.
Also, it's not just a matter of "I got mine." Living where I am afforded me class mobility that I likely would not have had in my life otherwise. I've been _dirt poor_ for most of my life, even in this apartment. What is your alternative to that?
Why are you so focussed on what other people have?
Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”
Amazing! What a strong argument. I've never heard of this (socialist) guy. Personally, I am a life-long new yorker (and capitalist) living in a luxury, deregulated building paying slightly more than market rate for my housing. My landlord does not raise my rent too aggressively, but could if he so chose. I sort of wish there were laws in place preventing him from doing so, but alas my unit is deregulated. In any case, he probably prefers long-term tenants, so doesn't need the government guidance on what a reasonable annual adjustment to my rent should be to keep me there.
Is it possible to argue that these hurdles are in place for some systemic or historically-shaped reasons? Would be curious to hear someone explain the regulation and high cost of entry outside of banking cartel and government incompetence.
OP: it seems like it's time to seek professional help. Your post implies worries about your mental health. Time spent regularly seeing a counselor is probably going to the be most effective thing for you.
