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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

"For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a step back to the Byzantine world of Commodore 64s."

This made me chuckle. Maybe if you define "generation" as "this year's college output" then you might be right, but if we're talking "generation" as in the past lifetime of software development then it's nowhere close.

Only in the last 5-10 years have we seen the rise of the well put together framework.

Also, I have no experience with iOS, but the Android framework is pretty damn nice from the perspective of somebody who actually lived through the C64 days!

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I don't think it's a lamentation over framework per se, but rather a step back from the web-hysteria of a few years ago, where you can pretty much, with a lot of elbow grease (aka Perl) tie together component A with component B and feed it into component C to do something cool/wicked/useful, where they're all giant open source projects.

Think of all the crazy things we did pluggin ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant MySQL instances.

This is no longer really possible with mobile. I recently pulled in some image recognition libs to my app, and it's an extreme struggle keeping a large, legacy, C++ lib from exploding all over a mobile device. We really are stepping far, far, back from the previous trend of writing code as if the metal they run on is but a detail.

"""Think of all the crazy things we did pluggin ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant MySQL instances."""

While I agree those were easy to use, I can't think of any crazy/cool things from that era websites.

Most of the cool/useful/nice web stuff is from the Ajax/fast JS/jQuery etc era of late.

"""I recently pulled in some image recognition libs to my app, and it's an extreme struggle keeping a large, legacy, C++ lib from exploding all over a mobile device. We really are stepping far, far, back from the previous trend of writing code as if the metal they run on is but a detail."""

It was never "but a detail", it was just that web development is seldom CPU/Memory-bound. Mobile development in the main is.

Also, if you were trying to do a competent 3D game engine, back in the same era you did PHP/MySQL stuff, you'd see that the PC metal was not "but a detail" at all.

It's also a little contradictory to lament about how easy it was to "plug ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant MySQL instances" and then compare it to the difficulty of not only programming for a mobile device, but also "pulling in some image recognition libs to my app".

Not only you're attempting something much more cpu intensive and difficult than using ImageMagick/PHP for web development, something that could have been just as difficult if not more so back in your web days, but you also try it in a device with less memory/cpu. Something's gotta give, right?

That said, nothing stops you writing plain apps for mobile that just do the same stuff you did on the web. There are plenty of frameworks that basically provide you with a browser view and let you do stuff (Platinum, etc).

    Most of the cool/useful/nice web stuff is from 
    the Ajax/fast JS/jQuery etc era of late

Wikipedia, Blogger, Flickr, a bazillion forums on which I spent countless hours. Ajax/JS/jQuery are cool, however when it comes to usefulness many times they are superfluous. The old Twitter interface was a lot more usable.

    web development is seldom CPU/Memory-bound

This is only an impression because the hard work gets done by the database or other external processes that are outside of your web server. Business logic is cheap if you can delegate the actual data processing and when you delegate, of course it's going to be I/O bound. On the whole if you count every component, web applications are the biggest consumers of these resources.

    nothing stops you writing plain apps for mobile that 
    just do the same stuff you did on the web

I agree, you can also have a native mobile interface, while the whole logic is done on server. Like in the case of a chess game, you could have the minimax algorithm (or whatever) on the server, with a push mechanism to notify the client when the move is ready.

C64s weren't so bad. I remember reading an interview with, I think, Geoff Crammond (author of the class Stunt Car Racer) where he said the C64 (in comparison to the Amiga) was the last machine where you actually could know every last trick about the hardware and keep it all in your head.

I think most major colleges are still teaching C++ as the main programming language. Sure, there are classes in Python or Ruby on occasion, but I think most are still in C++. I know a lot of schools teach Java, but that's a lot more similar to C++ than it is to something like Python.

If there can be considered a "main" programming language that is taught at most colleges, and that most students spend the majority of their time with, I would say it's Java.

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