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Comment by interfixus | Hacker News Reader

I am a retrograde, grumpy, obtuse old curmudgeon, so let me bite:

No, it is a terror. Applications produced with it are bloated monstrosities, gobbling up hundreds of megabytes in both storage and RAM before getting round to as much as putting a checkbox on screen. Bundling an entire web browser inside your program in order to provide portable GUI functionality like what Tk managed more than twenty years ago without breaking a sweat, and at roughly 1/100 the size, yeah, sure, it flies. So did the Spruce Goose, sort of.

But then, I never took to js, I never took to Chrome, I never took to bloat as a way of life.

[edit: typo]

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I agree with you and take it a step further:

It is totally embarrassing that programs are 100-1000 times the size they used to be, and slow. I think it shows an overall disinterest in our tooling and field, and it's shameful.

Another thought, however, an application I wrote is 30MB when packaged. On an average internet speed, this takes ~16 seconds for your average internet speed (15mbps). Even on 1mbps, it only takes 4 minutes for the application.

When unpacked, it weighs about 100MB. This disk space costs roughly £0.004 for an HDD or about £0.020 for an SSD.

In exchange for these extra costs, I get to use HTML, CSS and JS on both our website and our desktop applications and they get to share the same codebase. That alone must saves me 50% of the time. The fact people might have to spend upto 3 more minutes to download my application and that it costs them 2p to install it on their SSD is minimal compared to the fact that I can have twice as many features in the same amount of time.

Download is not the problem, the 10s start-up time is, as is those 100 MB RAM usage, even worse if you hit swap.

Why use JS when you can have Lua for scripting and a less annoying programming language for main code? Why use HTML and CSS when you can have a dynamic portable native UI as in Qt?

I smell laziness and cutting costs in those decisions, or rather offloading the costs onto users.

>Why use JS when you can have Lua for scripting

Have you tried NPM? If I want to write every single line of code for my application, I don't expect it to ship (unless it's extremely simple). When there is a library for almost everything, why not use one instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?

Have you used anything other than javascript? NPM is not unique, half the stuff it contains is also in the standard runtime of other frameworks.

I would thoroughly disagree with you that there is any other repository of libraries nearly the size of NPM. Take a look at ModuleCounts[0] and you'll see that NPM is growing 4x faster than the next sized repository (Maven) with already over double the number of modules.

[0] http://www.modulecounts.com/

Module counts aren't relevant. A good chunk of them are micro libraries (left pad) that are already covered by anything with a standard lib, half of them are abandoned crapware. I'll take 1 good library over 10 similar shitty ones any day.

We also had libraries long before every language needed it's own package manager.

PHP, Python, ColdFusion. ColdFusion didn't have a package manager until a couple of years ago and it was so bad, I built one for it. PHP Composer is just okay. Python's is a disaster.

You've got a knack for going with the worst programming languages available (python aside) don't you?

Eh, when you know nothing and you start programming, you start with what you can find, understand and use.

I have written Java, C and C++ when I was younger but I enjoy scripting languages more and they have provided for me well enough.

But, let's be honest here, "worst" is your bias for the languages which doesn't actually say anything other than your opinion.

There are such things as taste, esthetics, craftmanship and professional pride. Although of course I'll give you, we all make compromises all the time.

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