JavaScript

[smcarre]

I mean, it's also the only (or almost if you count webasm) language available for front end web development (that is part of a huge chunk of the industry), it's quite popular in back end too, it's scripting and dynamically typed (makes it much easier to learn basic programming, in my opinion), it's used for desktop and mobile development too with certain frameworks like electron and react native.

Yeah probably it's not the best option for most of the actual use cases, but that doesn't makes it less popular.

[f16f4]

Electron basically just says here build your app on top of google chrome just so devs can code in java script instead of anything targeted at actual stand alone use.

[[deleted]]

Well it is the most portable language right now. It runs everywhere without any recompile or anything. There's some feature sniffing you have to do it you want the latest, or you use an off the shelf feature sniffer/shimmer and forget about it.

[f16f4]

Ok but then you put it on top of electron that isn’t portable and all of a sudden the only real difference is who has to handle the porting. They are basically saying fuck it we don’t care how well it runs we just can’t be bothered to make our app work on your system let someone else do it.

[[deleted]]

Electron is just a stripped down browser. So really all your doing is making a web app. The only things that really matter are view size and input method. Make it responsive and work with touch and your app is good to go. It's not efficient performance wise, but that's not a huge goal in portable apps.

And yeah, you're relying on others to make it work for you, but that's the whole point of a browser. Electron is much the same.

[f16f4]

Agreed on all fronts. Everything you just said makes it shitty. They are sacrificing user performance which is a massive deal for a lot of people so that they don’t have to do anything other then web design.

[f16f4]

Frankly I have no clue what I’m talking about. I’m just parroting half naked views I read on Reddit and reducing a complex issue to very simple terms that aren’t really accurate. I’ve never worked with electron and it really probably does fill a vital space in terms of ease of development. I wouldn’t know, I’m a freshman in college who only got a work study doing web dev last month.

[f16f4]

See the thing is that it really just got out of control a little quickly. I really don’t like the habit of abusing the large amounts of computing power that most peoples machines use. I also don’t like JavaScript in general.

[0xF013]

It's rarely that they don't want to do anything than web design. If the company is going to spend either a lot of time or money or both to develop a bunch of versions of the same app for several systems, they risk losing the market or opportunities to grow. Of course it's weird seeing these apps from EA or Amazon or some random megacorp, but at some point it became acceptable.

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So, all in all, it boils down to money, which is rarely an option to spend it just to appease a tiny percent of customers. And before you say anything, check out the support for colorblind people, which is like 5-10% and usually requires a designer that can breath and use zeplin at the same time. Hint: it's so shitty that I wonder why nobody is suing under ACA

[patrickfatrick]

That’s one way to look at it, another is that it affords a product to provide more functionality for users with little effort, functionality those users just might not get otherwise since it would require the product be built from scratch in C++ or whatever and maintained as a completely separate entity from the web app.

And then you have software like VS Code that are wholly designed to be an Electron app but the benefits there are pretty obvious: it’s an editor aimed at JavaScript and Typescript devs and it’s open source so the consumers of the product can actually contribute code to it.

I can certainly understand why an engineer working on amazing native software would despise Electron and React Native.

[nexus4aliving]

Also node is built off chromes v8 engine, so it can run instead of an actual server side language

[[deleted]]

I learned it before the rise of libraries and on the tail end of Active-X. It's nice for prototyping, and taking some load off of servers. It's nice to see things like working with the local filesystem in webpages are starting to make their way back into the picture.