Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

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I spent a year building a pretty complex Silverlight app (which was then abandoned after Microsoft announced they were killing it) and you're wrong. Modern HTML/JS/CSS, when combined with a decent component framework, is more powerful. You seem to be yet another developer with chip on your shoulder about JavaScript, but you shouldn't let your prejudices blind to the reality of the web's current feature set.

If you want vector graphics, you have SVG. If you want imperative 2D graphics, you have Canvas. If you want 3D, you have WebGL. If you want video, you have the Video tag. If you want dynamic audio processing, you have the Web Audio API. If you want duplex, real-time or peer-to-peer communication, you have WebSockets and WebRTC. If you want client persistence, you have localStorage, sessionStorage and IndexedDB. If you want complex layout, you have CSS Flexbox and CSS Grids. If you want dynamic caching, you have Service Workers. If you want parallelisation, you have Web Workers. You have APIs to create, upload and download files from scratch, to instantiate typed arrays and get byte-level access.

You forget that Flash was a complete, well-rounded development environment, not just a language. It's a difference between Unity and e.g. writing your own solution in C++. The later is certainly way more powerful and gives you a lot more choices and freedom, but it takes a lot of effort and testing and learning to build a really productive tech stack and workflow that way. The same thing with HTML/JS/CSS. So many frameworks to choose from, IDE's have only very basic support for them, documentation sucks (if any), no good visual tools for animation, takes a lots of steps to push data from one tool to another (exporting/importing, converting different formats, etc.), you need to install a dozen of different tools and frameworks and then you still need to code a lot of basic stuff yourself. On the other hand Tools like Unity or Flash give you all you need in a single box, all perfectly integrated to work together, documented, you can just jump right into making things.

It's the same thing that Delphi & Visual Studio did for modern programming. If you were used to working in Turbo Pascal/C and switched to Delphi, it was just amazing what a productive boost you'd experience from having a true integrated development environment with all the little tools and drag&drop builders and ready-made components.

"Tools are for pussies - I only code in vim."

All jest aside - it's true that Flash is way more productive than the "true" web environment today. It has its drawbacks, but developer tooling was awesome.

All the things you list have terrible APIs, poorly thought out mechanics, mish-mashes of design philosophies. I've built silverlight apps and js ones and I disagree that html/js, even if you can use the bleeding edge, is anywhere near as powerful.

I may dislike javascript, sure, but it doesn't make me any less right that it's stupid that we still have no choice but to program in a particular language in today's effective OS, the browser. I generally use typescript now, but it's still rubbish compared to C# or Ruby or Python or [insert your favourite language]. And I feel the inanity of the present build infrastructure that we end up having to use is such an utter waste of my life.

Just think how much you'd chafe if you were forced to use a language you thought was substandard for 30% of your development time and waste hours or days every now and then wrestling build problems that I shouldn't even be thinking about it.

I certainly don't feel it's a chip, I think it's a perfectly sane response.

This. This is why I'm thankful to be a developer/designer at this time in the web's history. Browser support for features that I need to make a cohesive user experience has never been better!

I have a lot of gratitude to google, mozilla (and even Microsoft and Apple, as they come around to it) for making my job easier/possible.

> If you want client persistence, you have localStorage, sessionStorage and IndexedDB.

I really wish that we had a persistent, non-ephemeral web api for local storage. One that has to be manually deleted by the user, searchable by domain, just like a mobile app. It should ask you to allow it just like notifications or webcam usage, and allow you to set a maximum size with a reasonable fallback default. Until we have that, and full support for service worker features, mobile apps will be a necessity for many developers unfortunately.

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