Programming doesn't make it easy to not miss jokes like that. I'll never forget my mum's face after I told her that I was working on a "killAllChildren" function when I was at school
Makes total sense. It's even better for motivation of the developer. The offline client proves that it is possible to continue working on this huge project since it gives you "quick" feedback that you are making progress.
There was a book written a few years back that I haven't read but might answer some of these questions. "We Were Yahoo!: From Internet Pioneer to the Trillion Dollar Loss of Google and Facebook" https://a.co/d/9SuUXIn
I'll throw out Mr. Hedger Wang from Yahoo! as my nominee, he basically had the IE6 browser renderer in his head, and even though I never worked with him directly, just being able to ping on Y!M was an incredible help.
What made it special (2010-timeframe) was that we would do without thought what other companies struggled to do at that time (hot-hot failover, multi-region, "3 machine minimum" deployments), processing traffic for ~500M monthly users when spinning rust and 32gb of ram was considered "a lot".
My perspective on what happened is reeeally smart people solved really tough problems, then would either bail to Google (and later FB) to write the "v2.0" and solve those same problems but "better" or they'd go and start a full-blown company to sell that solution.
The tide rose around Yahoo! and both business-wise (and tech-wise), they didn't keep pace once their competitive advantage of "we can scale" dissipated.
I honestly don't think it's really all down to being greedy. Even the Linux desktop suffers from this to some extent.
I think it's because UI design is very much something that can't really be "solved" in the traditional sense, so a lot of us use our own opinions when we inevitably find a corner case that isn't working exactly the way we want.
> a lot of us use our own opinions when we inevitably find a corner case that isn't working exactly the way we want.
Most standard toolkits provide escape hatches to have your custom components. I think most designers wants their view imposed to the users instead of following the platform constraints. Like instead of the standard play/pause button every player have, they want their own custom ones. Instead of using the standard tree widget, they want to create another that is the same, but behaves a bit differently. And then they say GTK is not good, let's go with HTML in Electron.
Linux has two application toolkits and they work pretty well together. Windows, again, has a dozen. And they're closed source. Microsoft could just... not... do that. They control the entire thing. But they chose to do it.
Greed is maybe not the right word, but maybe it's more like ideological greed. Like everyone wants things their way 100%. They won't settle for 99%!
Like okay, with Apple and vulkan and metal, is vulkan the best API? No. Is it the most performant? No.
But it's pretty fucking good. Its 95% of the way there. But for greedy apple, that's not good enough. So they say "fuck you, heres metal, good luck developers!"
And now people only make Mac apps if there's a gun to their head and they really need that tiny slice of market share.
Its the same thing with Qt versus bespoke UIs in ImGUI or whatever. Qt is really, really good. Its not perfect.
But we're really gonna burn it all down and start over for like... a 1% improvement in code architecture or something? Really? We're chopping off both our legs so that our pinky finger hurts slightly less?
Sigh. Okay. Such is the way of developers, I guess.
You are ignoring all of the advantages of writing a web client. Are you really saying that distributing a native app for every platform is better than writing something that uses the browser?
Well, distribution is the killer feature. More, it's inherent property of the platform (web).
Web devs are in full control of their whole stack (excluding the browser where you occasionally need to account for incompatibilities), have to maintain only one version of the app (no upgrade needed on client-side), are not constrained by the platform owner's policies (app store tax).
Yes, it's more limited than native technologies in other ways, so it's not an answer for every problem.
> have to maintain only one version of the app (no upgrade needed on client-side)
Except what happens when it doesnt run the same on Firefox as it does on Chrome? Or what about when Edge is run on Win7 and youre app doesnt render correctly? Yes you only code one version of an app, but you are still obliged to consider the underlying platform - which is exactly compile once, run anywhere is it? its more like compile once but make sure you test it on all the different browser/OS combos before you do.
Distribution aside, its more likely you only know web languages and THATs why youre coding your project on the web stack. Pick the best tool for the job
I did not know this was such a widespread problem until everyone online started talking about it. Going to try and find out if this also affects Portuguese sex workers even though I feel like it 100% does
