I've been using UE4 for VR development as a hobby for the last year or so. I have to say that I was against Blueprints and had quite to fight with myself to give them a chance, but once you get used to it it's not that bad. IMO still worse than pure code and sometimes much slower to write (complex arithmetic operations are painful), but at least it's not C++.
Also, sometimes a visual representation of what your code is doing helps you simplify your code architecture when it gets too convoluted.
This just keeps getting better and better. Thank you for your effort.
I'm a big fan, Elixir + Phoenix is excellent enough, and LiveView is what really sealed the deal for me as the perfect web development stack. It's simple, it's fast, it works.
Sure, it has a few rough spots that have to be worked around when you start to push its limits, but as this blog post showed it's perfect to quickly have a working web application by completely skipping having to write client-side code. I developed a couple of prototypes and single-use applications in hours that with any other stack would have taken me days. Hell, I'd argue that in some cases it took me less time to complete my app with LiveView than it would have taken me to setup Webpack with Frontend Framework.
I don't believe it to be a silver bullet for sure, and it has to prove its worth at scale, but it gives excellent results with little effort, and honestly the reduced tedium is worth it on its own.
The RPi was already exceptional for its price point, and this version seems to address the few problems it had (lack of Gigabit, USB speed and RAM capacity) and add onto it even more features. It almost seems too good to be true.
Raw performance means nothing, it's just yet another metric that can be traded off in favor of other aspects that make up a good application. In VSCode's case, it was traded off in favor of ease of development, which spurred an extremely active and ever growing ecosystem of extensions. Was it worth it? The download counter says yes, because despite it being "slow" compared to other editors, the tradeoff is not even noticeable by most of its users.
This all boils down to the art of "it's good enough". Take game development for an example. You could write an engine from scratch using Vulkan APIs and all that jazz and run at 144fps@4k on a toaster. Or, you know, you could trade off the performance and settle for just using Unity and optimizing wherever possible. It's not as fast, but as long as the user is not frustrated by it, who cares? You just saved a lot of development time. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.
Same thing applies here. The VSCode team did a damn good job of keeping performance just about over the "good enough" threshold of most of its users, <flamebait>unlike other Electron based applications</flamebait>. Of course, that threshold varies based on the user and his machine, but outright dismissing VSCode based solely on the assumption that editors cannot be written in html+js is simply short-sighted.
Apples and oranges.
3D TVs and cinemas serve no new purpose. There is objectively little to no difference between watching a movie in 3D or in 2D, it is literally a gimmick to attract customers.
VR, on the other hand, is completely unprecedented. It unlocks a way to interact with virtual environments that simply was not possible before. It has practical uses that we haven't had time to discover yet. Dismissing it as a gimmick and comparing it to 3D movies is shortsighted, in my opinion.
One might argue that the technology is not there yet, but that would be comparable to PDAs preceding smartphones.