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[return to "Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web"]
1. rimliu+h3[view] [source] 2017-07-27 11:44:59
>>jaffat+(OP)
I am starting to get a vibe that there is a new breed of programmers who think that knowing just one language is good enough and learning anything else is "stifling innovation".

I don't even want to start on "PWAs work more seamlessly than native". I just cannot take person making such claims seriously.

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2. Sjenk+V4[view] [source] 2017-07-27 12:03:00
>>rimliu+h3
This kind of scares me to. The vibe that I have is that (web)developers want to make JS into a silver bullet to solve every problem (backend nodeJS, apps react native cordova etc). But I also wonder why they don't want to learn a new language. Some languages really make you look at a problem from a different perspective and to be honest also work better then JS.
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3. egeozc+76[view] [source] 2017-07-27 12:13:47
>>Sjenk+V4
The vibe you have is wrong.

It's not about learning a new language. Most web developers are comfortable in many languages. Plase stop attacking a straw-man. Not many web developers say stuff like "omg these new things are web scale" or "oh javascript is everything I need, I hate everything else". Yeah the author didn't want to learn a new language. Which is not an insane decision at the very beginning of a project.

The biggest deal, though, is code reuse. If I'm not given enough budget, I'm not developing a native app for your precious walled-garden, sorry. I can also rightfully complain that what you have is a walled-garden, and also that the owner of the garden inhibiting a cross-platform alternative.

This has nothing to do with ignorance. Give me a cross-platform API, I'm happy.

At the end, as long as there is docs & support, most really don't care if it's Haskell or PHP.

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4. rimliu+j9[view] [source] 2017-07-27 12:42:25
>>egeozc+76

  > Most web developers are comfortable in many languages.
Citation needed. Especially the "most" part. I've been web developer for 10 years when iPhone came out. I liked what I saw, so when SDK came out I've learned Objective-C. Then I learned Swift. And because I know both sides all this feature parity talk really makes me sad about ignorant people not even willing to learn.

"Walled-garden" has long ago became thought-stopping cliche. But if it is walled garden, then I am thankful that Apple does not allow to litter it with some JS scraps. All this cross-platform talk is just being cheap, being lazy or both. It save money, but it produces the lowest common denominator UX wise. And I would not be surprised that maintaining cross-platform monstrosity eats away any cost-savings pretty quickly.

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5. egeozc+ea[view] [source] 2017-07-27 12:51:31
>>rimliu+j9
You know that the need for citation goes both ways and anecdotal evidence isn't a real reference, right? Web developers know at least JS, HTML & CSS. Too many know Ruby, Python and/or PHP. Significant amount of them know C#/Java/Go or something similar. Then there is Typescript, all those compile-to-js languages and so on. I've never ever seen a web developer who could only program in JS. That would be very ridiculous. I personally can't count how many languages I worked and had to work with. My list includes ColdFusion. I'm very comfortable with at least 5 languages and 6 platforms.

> I am thankful that Apple does not allow to litter it with some JS scraps.

Oh, so much for being objective. References and all.

> All this cross-platform talk is just being cheap, being lazy or both.

Are you even serious? You really blame engineers/developers coming up with trade-offs for being cheap and/or lazy?

> And I would not be surprised that maintaining cross-platform monstrosity eats away any cost-savings pretty quickly.

No it doesn't. I'm a developer since much more than 10 years. I guess that's enough of a reference :)

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6. Square+wc[view] [source] 2017-07-27 13:15:13
>>egeozc+ea
I'd also add SQL to your language list, and often SASS, gulp/grunt configuration, JSON, ASP.NET, and so on.

And come on, JS is a C-style language. If you know one you know them all.

It's also not a difficult jump to OOP languages; especially now that Java 8 supported lambdas and C# supports async/await. It's hard to learn concepts, not syntax.

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7. egeozc+Ad[view] [source] 2017-07-27 13:23:40
>>Square+wc
Don't you agree, though, thinking that web developers don't write iOS apps because they don't want to learn Swift, is a bit ridiculous at this point? Yet another language isn't even significant for a typical web developer. For me, tooling (XCode) took more time to learn than being able to write acceptable Swift...
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8. Square+Xf[view] [source] 2017-07-27 13:41:14
>>egeozc+Ad
Yes, I agree. I was agreeing with you before as well. Setting up a Mac, learning a new IDE, and getting your tooling/builds set up is a far bigger pain point than actually learning the new language.

At least that's the case if it's logically similar. C, Java, JS, etc are mostly transferable. I might not say the same about something like Haskell.

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