
The problem with Electron - enkiv2
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-problem-with-electron-162a70c3b29f
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zeveb
> Javascript is just a basically-ordinary scripting language, and isn’t
> inordinately terrible (or even Perl-levels of terrible). It’s not great, but
> it’s OK, and that’s good enough for lots of people.

I'll take issue with that. JavaScript _is_ a broken language, but where it
falls on the broken-languages continuum isn't the problem: the fact that
JavaScript exists is the problem. Web pages shouldn't be executable code; they
should be documents. The world _should_ have a universally-understood
programming language, of course, but that language isn't JavaScript (IMHO it's
Lisp, but perhaps some folks would make an argument for Scheme, others for
Smalltalk & others for ML).

> The problem with Electron is that browsers are terrible at literally
> everything.

Completely agree here. With apologies to Gene Spafford, a web browser is like
is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea - massive, difficult to
redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts
of excrement when you least expect it.

> It’s easier to write a simple GUI app with GTK when you don’t know GTK than
> it is to write the same thing as a web app when you’re already a pro at
> writing web apps.

I suspect that's true. Getting a few tiny things working in the web stack is
easy — getting a full app running properly is … obtuse.

~~~
enkiv2
I agree that web pages shouldn't have executable code. I think that's a
separate issue from whether or not, given that web pages already have it,
javascript is a reasonable choice. It's also a separate issue from whether or
not live-editing ASTs for rich text is an appropriate GUI layer for
javascript.

Basically, to the extent that web tech is acceptable at all, it has no
interactivity. HTML and CSS aren't particularly good even as representations
of static rich text, but they are far, far worse as graphics toolkits.

