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Comment by college_physics | Hacker News Reader

There is this niche movement that argues that good code should be very long lived. It should solve problems in a fundamentally efficient way that makes it hard to turn into obsolete and throwaway code.

There are not many examples of such code bases. Maybe numerical algebra libraries come close.

Reading through the comments it seems that providing (fairly basic by now) UI functionality on cross-platform basis has not matured to the point of providing a stable paradigm.

Given how many people and for how long have been banging on this problem it feels a bit strange.

Surely people can find better use for their time and energy than churning through half-baked frameworks?

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Incentives.

One has to ride (and eventually) create trends to sell.

> Surely people can find better use for their time and energy than churning through half-baked frameworks?

We should have all stayed on backbone or Prototype.js with that logic.

People look for alternatives because the status quo is awful (slow, verbose, footgunful).

You’re saying “who needs cars when we got horses? Cars break down all the time”

No, when you mention js libraries you are already starting the clock way too late.

The UI problem is not new. People were already building clunky UI cars long ago. MFC was introduced by Microsoft in 1992.

Of course the emergence of the web platform and mobile/touch devices complicates the matter as you now have a proliferation of platforms to address (desktop native, desktop web, mobile native, mobile web) but my argument is that fundamental patterns on how to do this efficiently should have emerged by now - and I see exactly the opposite.

It would be nice to see some sort of convergence. Reinventing the wheel might be "fun" or gainful in a narrow sense but it certainly doesn't help with productivity.

The NextSTEP/Cocoa family tree has lasted long enough to be interesting. No first-hand experience with it myself though.

Never been close to one of these coveted Next machines but checking out what wikipedia writes about it [0] captures perfectly my point about good UI frameworks supporting productivity:

"1990 CERN: A Joint proposal for a hypertext system is presented to the management. Mike Sendall buys a NeXT cube for evaluation, and gives it to Tim Berners-Lee. Tim's prototype implementation on NeXTStep is made in the space of a few months, thanks to the qualities of the NeXTStep software development system."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

For what you're talking about, Computer Science History needs to be taught, which it is not, and if it did it would be filled with current industry trend propaganda. Fact of the matter, every developer have to learn it all themselves because this history is not taught. However, most developers get caught up in a "build now!, ship now! now! now! now!" and no history or accrued deep knowledge from other developers can be transferred with any quality or retention.

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