Jokes aside, I do not know if this is me getting older and becoming more grouchy and/or some of the tools (Gmail, Google Search, macOS/MacBook <whichever>) we've been using for a while are becoming more obtuse and less user (or power user) friendly in name of <some product goal>
many tools are attempting becoming (and often failing) to become more beginner user friendly. And while that implies dumbing down the tools at times, they still have advance features which are either progressively shown in context, or hidden behind additional advanced user menus or modes. Thus it makes it harder to reason about (as a power user does) and you are reduced to incantations rather than deduction. On top of that there is an increase of change, which prevents one from better learning the system. In effect, to a first approximation, the systems are now non-deterministic. For a causal user, they never care about that anyway and for the best systems, the UX improvements work. But for power-users, the non-determinism is going to drive one crazy.
Agreed. Another negative side effect is that power users cannot help casual users anymore. They become dependent on the developer of the software in question and won't learn about the pipeline of how things are created.
A beverage dispenser has a good UX, but its usage is fairly restricted.
Well, in case if this matters at all. I truly enjoy how you ‘eastdakota and ‘Kentonv engage with this forum - whether things are going well or not, I’ve come to expect a level of honest, direct and transparent dialog from you all. Oh and you are a really good author - truly enjoyed your book.
Good to see you here again, completely off topic follow up: did you or your siblings ever end up writing about work your father did with three letter agencies?
No, I suspect that we have all the information that we will get.
He earned a bronze star, silver star, and a couple of purple hearts, during WWII (I only found one, but he was wounded at least twice -maybe they just award one).
It earned my parents a place in Arlington, with the whole caisson/21-gun salute thing, but we have no idea why he got them.
There was a big fire, in St. Louis, in the 1950s (I think), that destroyed a lot of records.
Forget hearing anything he did with The Company. He was one of the first field agents. I think he may have been recruited in the first year or so of the agency. We think at least one of his brothers may also have been a "company man," but we'll never know. He took that secret to the grave.
If you haven’t tried already and you’re interested, you might try filing a FOIA request for any documents that the company might have. The early days OSS / SSU documents are largely public information these days and when they’re not, it can be the result of an oversight that a request reviewer might notice if prompted. I don’t think much of anything from that era is currently considered to be sensitive information.
I fully agree that toolchain you mentioned gives blazing fast initial devX, hot reload and everything. If that’s what you are optimizing for, it is a perfect solution.
OTOH when you want to optimize for long term maintenance, growing codebase that is safe and easy to grow, easy to refactor, easy to check for odd things. I’d lean heavily on something compiled and with promise/guarantee of safety every time.
In other words, it is all about trade offs and to each his own.
My most sincere thanks to the author(s) for “Why Not” section. This level of self awareness and transparency makes me so happy; it takes so much guess work and unnecessary back and forth out of the discourse. Again - kudos!
In my opinion, this is the way forward. You cannot convince anyone that does frontend stuff to even try, or EVEN switch to this. We have to prove that this is a viable option, WASM is a viable way, WASM is actually more efficient etc. there are benchmarks and targeted studies... it just seems that browser vendors and devs haven't catched up yet
HTML & CSS is a viable option. HTML is actually more efficient. There are benchmarks and studies, yet they are not needed, as the difference is apparent.
Must we cede control of user agents to random third parties, loading and executing ever more obfuscated, inaccessible, bloated and hostile code? AFAICT, most of the coded loaded in a typical browser serves a user-hostile purpose.
Do you think wasm support should be mandatory for random web pages? Do you think it will not be used to shove even more bloated, hostile etc code? Will it not be used to circumvent/prevent adblockers etc? Do I need to link to a study showing most wasm is used in a hostile manner?
IMO, wasm is a net-negative on the web. Even though it does have significant good uses. It should be (or should have been) opt-in for specific pages that have a good use for it.
So often people get emotional about languages and frameworks. They’re tools, and tools have trade offs. The “Why Not” section recognizes that. Super impressive.
