That's not practical, the high sea can be incredibly dangerous, even with modern nautical technology. Most tech out there is informational, there's very little you can actually do if the ocean decides to throw a tantrum.
Also, ships don't just go to waste when they reach EOL, if they do. They get scrapped, similar to a car I guess, but a lot of material can be reused or recycled or sold, and so on.
Anyways yeah, giant tugs, not a good idea. Not a good use of resources.
Autism is one of the most complex moving-parts mental disorders that I know of.
I'm speaking about kids mainly, because that's what I'm familiar with, but some kids have mood swings and some don't, some have cognitive tempo irregularities, some have sensory disruptive effects, some have learning disability effects, some have communication difficulties, some have spatial permanence issues, some have memory issues, there are a million different components to the autism spectrum.
The autism spectrum is often thought of as a number line, but it actually exists in several dozen dimensions, it's a very deep spectrum, with documented cases all over it.
It gets worse now that there's so much medication flowing around, there are kids who don't have attention disorders getting put on attention meds, kids with normal social skills getting out on psychotic stabilizers.
Autism has been affected strongly by how aggressively mobile the psychopharmaceutical industry has become. It's disgusting. It's completely demonic that mental illnesses are graphed and measured and these MEDICINE companies are optimizing for how much orange plastic bottles are being assigned to children!
The article is right, DSM did call for it a few years ago, but it will take time and effort to reeducate doctors, the public, the children... It will take time before parents begin to realize the extent to which they are being manipulated and profiteered upon, and the effects of all these drugs in these kids will be profound.
I feel strongly about this, but I'm so disenchanted with how America handles big pharma. It's a complete joke.
Orange plastic and green paper is worth enough to violate the minds of our youth.
It doesn't help that assistance in schools is based on kids getting certain diagnoses (at least where I live in the U.S.), Autism being on of them. This means that a number of kids either have other disorders or really none at all are labeled with this because it's a way of working the system.
To make matters worse, I've had arguments with teachers about what constitutes being Autistic. My son was diagnosed with Autism when he was 3/4, and with therapy he's doing quite well, but he has his quirks. I have to remind people that just because he doesn't act the way their other children did who were diagnosed in the classroom, doesn't mean that he isn't on the spectrum, and I remind that they aren't qualified to officially determine his mental health. (And if they are, then we're going to have another discussion about performing a medical procedure on a child without the consent of their parent.)
Diagnoses for conditions without a known causal mechanism should be thought of as much as a reflection on the social and institutional context as on the diagnosed person. It's only fair since it's the society and institution that needed the label in order to accommodate the diagnosed person in the first place.
I'm curious what your background and experience is to classify the Autism spectrum as a mental disorder? I believe a better classification would be a developmental disorder - which I personally prefer to state as developmental blocks, which makes the spectrum of symptoms/behaviours and sets of behaviours as symptoms become easier to understand; and depending on when (and perhaps how) the developmental block started, will in part dictate where along natural evolution and brain development they are.
Pharma of course wants to classify it as a mental disorder so then doctors will be allowed to prescribe medications.
I'm curious too what you mean by several dozen dimensions? I wonder if you mean the same thing as I do when I say "set of behaviours?"
And yes, the industrial complex with pharma has learned how to indoctrinate the medical and educational system, and fine-tuned their marketing/advertising. I get sick to my stomach when I go to the US and put TV on, the constant flood of ads for medications that are all fluff information being presented.
Don't take my personal opinion and make it accountable to a professional one. I'm not a doctor. But before doing finance I used to do some basic tutoring and teachers assistant stuff for a place filled with kids with "autism" and there was a very wide array of personalities there.
As per dimensionality, yes that's what I was saying. Each symptom or descriptor exists on its own spectrum, not the entire disorder/illness/whatever it is medically classified.
Anyways, yeah. I don't know what's an illness, what's a disorder, I don't particularly care what the medical industry uses to distinguish those two words, but I've spent a chunk of time working with autistic students, and its close to my heart.
The wide array of personalities is why it's considered a spectrum - so either saying autism or autism spectrum is referencing the same thing. There are certainly severities of what behaviours and the level that they will present - they all fit within an evolving framework and understanding of autism though. Things can be difficult to diagnose, primarily because there can be multiple causes of symptoms. Someone with anxiety might be eating a food that makes them anxious, or they have unhealed PTS, etc.
A problem with taking the pharma approach to treatment of someone with autism is that, imaging being super hypersensitive to touch - the constant agitation from contact by clothing may make you constantly anxious right? So do you treat anxiety as a symptom of the sensitivity? It doesn't really make sense to do.
The complexity and the number of dimensions is exactly why the APA decided to delete AS as a diagnosis and create a single diagnostic label. Do you know why, out of all the many dimensional, we ended up categorizing based on the one specific aspect? Basically, it's because it determined what triggered the initial referral - it was an artifact of how our health system is set up, not anything actually intrinsic to the condition itself. It's not even clear what an actually-meaningful diagnostic classification would look like.
There are drugs that have been shown to improve specific symptoms that can manifest with ASD. These drugs are not always effective but can be part of a wholistic support program (including therapy, school district support, and lifestyle changes). Any of these drugs should only be administered under the careful supervision of a psychiatrist.
I wonder what role inhibitory control plays in the behaviors of ASD. Is it that an autistic person is unable to control their irregular behavior, or is it simply that their perception of the world is different than most neurotypical people?
I can understand why high-functional individuals or even the parents dealing with moderate cases are afraid of the stigma but the whole "it is not a desease" is very harmful for families dealing with more severe cases: it is always taxing for the family and often very debilitating for the individual.
My 5 yers old son wouldn't be able to attend a regular school without 3 years of expensive therapy and a dedicated tutor in class so the last thing I want is an excuse for my health insurance to deny assistance. The safety network a lot worse than what is available for dawn's without this PC BS.
There's not much of a useful distinction between these categories and words, though. "Disease" is a very general category that, depending on who you ask, contains all disorders. Many psychiatric developmental disorders do have clear established physical causes, so in that sense they're not much different than being born with a malformed heart, other than that the defect is in a different location.
The only real consensus is that "disease" does not describe traumatic injuries, e.g. if you break your ankle in a bike accident that isn't a disease. Note that many people conflate "disease" with "infectious disease", but the actual general category "disease" is quite broad and encompasses much more.
Anyway, it's arguing over semantics, like the perennial argument over whether Java parameters are passed by reference, or if their references are passed by value, or if they're passed by value, etc. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16896150
Its a general term people use to mean "not normal". What else should we call it? Everyone loves to play semantics and politics when it comes to categorising mental abnormalities. No one wants their affliction to be considered an "illness"
Basically you're unleashing a horde of loaded words in an effort to explain why the first loaded word choice was appropriate.
For a significant portion of those with autism, the way their brain works is different than the median human but they are still basically fully functional human beings. My handy dictionary defines abnormal as "deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying." They match the first part of the definition, but the second part is very much open to question. Being different is not necessarily undesirable, nor worrying, nor an affliction, nor an illness.
People like you are one of the biggest reasons autism is too broad of a term.
Maybe these words seem loaded to self-diagnosed, asperger glorifying, "neurodivergent," ever-woke social justice armchair linguists like yourself.
I'd love for all of you to be squarely outside of the same diagnosis my little brother has.
I can't stress how much your "fully functioning" "open to question" "non-illness difference" version of autism deeply offends those who have been touched by real autism. Not, got me a job at Google savante autism. Not, I'm a nerd who remembers every episode of Naruto and no one likes me because I never shower so my excuse is my neurodivergence autism.
I long for the day when my brother's socially crippling mood swings and severe learning disability is no longer trapped under the same umbrella as a group of people who want to remove disability, retardation, or illness from a definition that has literally destroyed the lives of many individuals and families across the world.
I am disgusted by this optimistic view on autism. Championed by the most privileged of those with the disorder. You all fight a "stigma" for a mental disorder that you find has some "perks" as if the child thrashing his head against a wall and screaming at the top of his lungs because his brain registers every other sensation as pain and pain as pleasure doesn't even exist.
I have no sympathy for your entire assessment yet we agree on one thing, me maybe more so than you. The sooner we redefine autism into a multitude of different mental disorders, the better.
> People like you [...] I am disgusted [...] I have no sympathy
There's obviously deep personal experience behind your comment, and that commands respect, but you can't attack other users here, no matter how wrong they are. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
I know it's not easy when one's struggles and wounds get suckerpunched by another comment. But we all need to remember that in a forum like this, where relational bandwidth is extremely limited, someone else's comment is constructed at least 50% out of our own interpretation of their words. Maybe a lot more than 50%. More here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13102115.
I am also the older brother to an autistic sibling. Thank you for writing this, I have the same thoughts and fury.
To be glib, I wish there was a specific category of disorder for those people who reflect the tale of the Princess and the Pea when it comes to their 'neurodifferences'.
There used to be a distinction between aspergers and autism in the DSMV, although the eventually removed it on the grounds that the two groups were just different magnitudes of the same symptoms. I think that we should keep the term aspergers around for social reasons, maybe not in our medical lexicon but surely in our cultural one.
Calling people who have autism to not have "real autism" is a misinterpretation of the many behaviors associated with autism and why it may be considered neurodivergence or a developmental illness instead.
There are people who are non-verbal but sign or write perfectly well, what are they considered?
There are people who are very vocal but speak with an awkward cadence and have mood swings, are they "really autistic"?
There are people who are verbally eloquent but constantly participate in stim behavior and need constant observation to make sure they clothe, bathe, and feed themselves appropriately, do they have "real autism"?
There are people who may be able to hold down a part time job but cannot have a full time position because they have no capacity towards basic organizational skills necessary to have regular hours, do they have "real autism"?
There are people who are nonverbal and constantly stim and have severe learning disabilities but have enough organizational ability to hold full-time hours in, say, construction, because they're highly organized and don't have sensory problems with the work. Do they have "real autism"?
Autism is complicated because it is more a set of descriptions of related symptoms, in which each individual may have more or less of each symptom. From what I understand, autism can't be viewed as a "rating" of better or worse autism. Instead it should be viewed as a gradient of behaviors, individually are considered more or less functional.
I should also note that your language is highly dehumanizing to your bother, emphasizing on the impact of his autism on the people around him, and defining "real autism" not by symptoms but by how it affects non-autistic people. I don't believe this is much different than trying to direct a conversation about autism to making it a conversation about how hard it is to be a non-autistic and live with autistic people.
EDIT: Of note, I agree that it may be more pertinent to create different categories of autism based on the group of symptoms, but I'm not sure (and I don't know if there are studies) if they can be so easily teased apart as implied here.
> From what I understand, autism can't be viewed as a "rating" of better or worse autism.
For the sake of making a pedantic and spurious semantic argument, you are willing to ignore the life-altering severity of jklinger410's brother's symptoms.
> I don't believe this is much different than trying to direct a conversation about autism to making it a conversation about how hard it is to be a non-autistic and live with autistic people.
Here you are not only ignoring the very severe consequences that autism has for jklinger410's brother, you try to dismiss jklinger410's evident distress and concern as self-serving.
> Autism is complicated because it is more a set of descriptions of related symptoms, in which each individual may have more or less of each symptom. From what I understand, autism can't be viewed as a "rating" of better or worse autism. Instead it should be viewed as a gradient of behaviors, individually are considered more or less functional.
I guess that's what the article is about, but it doesn't communicate the range as well as your post does. I wonder though, what's the purpose of having such an amorphous definition? The word becomes completely useless the more symptoms it describes. And the more symptoms it describes, the more unlikely it is that they're even at all related in terms of root cause and treatment. And I would think that results in a reduction in research progress.
> I agree that it may be more pertinent to create different categories of autism based on the group of symptoms
I know little about this topic, but this seems destined to fail and unnecessary. What's wrong with simply describing the actual symptoms? They're clear enough on their own. And boxing them up into a convenient single word diagnosis doesn't seem helpful at this stage of understanding.
For example:
> There are people who are non-verbal but sign or write perfectly well, what are they considered?
I would consider these as people who communicate well via non-verbal methods only.
> There are people who are very vocal but speak with an awkward cadence and have mood swings, are they "really autistic"?
Drop the autistic binary and just call them people with mood swings. Perhaps clarify that the mood swings can be disruptive and uncontrollable, or if that isn't the case, don't mention it at all because everybody has non-disruptive mood swings and deals with it. The awkward cadence doesn't even require mentioning if they can communicate effectively.
> There are people who are verbally eloquent but constantly participate in stim behavior and need constant observation to make sure they clothe, bathe, and feed themselves appropriately, do they have "real autism"?
The description stands on its own perfectly well without trying to determine if it's "autism". How does it help to make that distinction?
>> if the child thrashing his head against a wall and screaming at the top of his lungs because his brain registers every other sensation as pain and pain as pleasure
This is sad. Is this the right way for me to speak about it? Your just jerking your internet boner to someone who is in pain.
It's not ok to attack someone else like this regardless of how wrong they are. We ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.
Instead, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow this simple heuristic: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
This response, describing autism as being merely different, is exactly why the single diagnostic label was a mistake, and should be immediately reversed. I know an autistic person whose ability to use language is so impaired that only his parents and siblings can communicate in any meaningful way with him. Effective use of language is a signature feature of being human, and to dismiss an inability to do so as being merely 'different' is a cruel dismissal of some very serious problems that have come to define the life of this family - most of all, of course, for the victim himself (and yes, he is a victim of circumstance.)
You're absolutely right, but in the scientific autismverse, this is a very hot topic, and there are often flame wars and arguments. This is the equivalent of a psychologist using tabs instead of spaces.
We all know what you and I meant, but the lingo in the academic side of all this has very distinct connotations, etc.
I love that GNU loves Guile. There are few Scheme implementations as well polished as guile is, and what a breath of fresh air it can be to sit down to some '() stew after a few rough weeks of spreadsheet hell at work.
Might be just me, but it's kind of like having another universe to take a vacation in.
It does make me miss types, doing data structure programming in scheme can be irritating I guess, but still. I can compose, I can syntax-rules if I wanted, etc.
It's a pity GNU doesn't use Common Lisp instead of Scheme — it has rich types, data structures & more. It's a language built for programming large systems, rather than teaching small examples.
R7RS large is underway now! CL also has unhygienic macros, non-lispy loop grossness, lots of cruft, lots of poorly named functions that are named two different ways in two different places, and generally reeks of the 70s.
Scheme actually tried to compete with CL once, with a language called T. It had something sorta similar to CLOS and if I recall it was aiming for optimized performance per Sussman and Steele, but it eventually languished.
SBCL is the only thing keeping CL alive and they don't have the wherewithall to begin a modernized spec.
I don't hate CL, but I LOVE scheme. It is much more pleasant to actually work in, and feels cleaner. All the potholes of CL leave me checking under my fingernails for grime.
Scheme was implemented as a clean toy/educational Lisp on top of Maclisp in the mid 70s.
Scheme was defined too small upto R5RS and in R6RS is got unlispy.
> Scheme actually tried to compete with CL once
It never really did, since all implementations were different. There are lots of great Scheme implementations (MIT Scheme, Chez Scheme, ...) - but all were different. Then a bunch of extension were bolted onto Scheme - but the base was too small.
> It is much more pleasant to actually work in, and feels cleaner.
Which Scheme? Chicken Scheme? Racket - which is no longer a Scheme? Kawa? They are cleaner than CL?
The last clean Scheme was R5RS - and that was underspecified as a programming language.
Whenever I used Scheme I missed keyword arguments, CLOS, LOOP, optimization declarations, type declarations... Oh, wait. All those and much more has been added to Scheme in some ways. Unfortunately the result does not look 'cleaner'.
> CL also has unhygienic macros, non-lispy loop grossness, lots of cruft, lots of poorly named functions that are named two different ways in two different places, and generally reeks of the 70s.
That's all true enough; I believe that non-hygienic macros are a vital capability of a programming language (and Common Lisp being a Lisp-n makes them much less of a problem), and that LOOP is okay. I don't mind the cruft much: it's a mostly-backwards-compatible language, and backwards-compatibility is important; it's why Lisp code from the 80s can still run now, almost 40 years later.
I don't hate Scheme, really: it's a very neat little language. But it's completely unsuited for production work on large systems, which are what I'm interested in. Case in point: call/cc. It's nifty, really cool and absolutely has no place in any production system — it's ultimately just a very-lightly-structured GOTO.
I find it rather rare for GNU to actually use (any) lisp or support it. Sometimes I have a feeling that only a few hard working people somehow carry the torch of Guile as standard extension language of GNU project. :(
Guix uses it extensively. I'm away from a computer now but I'm sure there are some gifted minds working on it. Andy Wingo, others.
And anyways, isn't that the case with most software? HN loves APL, but there's only a few implementations around any more, Arc used to be the big topic of HN, it's all but dead, software comes and goes.
Scheme will die someday, or change enough that its something different, but the lessons of programming with linked lists and eval will stick around in those that bother to learn them. Ie, people like you and I.
Maybe you should check the Savannah repo. Maybe they need some work done that you could do!
I don't understand what you're asking. Python is completely unlike scheme.
The type situation irks me because I do ocaml for a living, so I rely on the type system a lot. Scheme reminds me of a more seductive flavor of FP, though sometimes it's cumbersome to ensure that a data structure isn't being subtly changed somewhere.
I hope rust community gets more interested in openfl. There's some good libraries already, opengl support, vulkan, there's ggez which mimics the LOVE api, but OpenFL is a fully equipped kitchen sink that a lot of multimedia developers are already familiar with, or used to be.
Congrats to OpenFL team! Fantastic work, inspiring dedication!
Armory is super cool. It's probably the flagship application for Kha (another Haxe framework), and given the death of Blender game engine, seems a likely replacement in the Blender ecosystem.
Gosh, I want to spend some time with rust and ggez, and then some guy shows me this awesome haxe engine!
I hadnt seen this!
That's a pretty high-powered kit though, it's got console support, it's got volumetric lighting, all sorts of cool optimizations, wow! Where have they been hiding it?!
Right. I learned that in the UK there is even an Anti-social Behavior Order (ASBO), essentially a catch-all law for people exhibiting these behaviors (which apparently spans all kinds of stuff from graffiti to littering). No comment as to the rightness or wrongness of this, but there it is.
No, but CERN Is known to be careful with their PR. Presumably, and this is just my intuition speaking, a big enough cluster of computers would solve this, but they're taking an opportunity to experiment with different techniques and methods for this experiment, and that's pretty much it.
If CERN had an unlimited budget, I suspect they'd do it however they did it before.
This is not a problem that can be solved just by throwing more compute resources at it. It's not as simple as simply having too much data to process, the real issue is that each detector has a time resolution that goes down to about a nanosecond. If you get one collision per nanosecond then it's pretty straight forward to associate every one of the (possibly) million detector hits to a single event and reconstruct it accordingly. The issues arises when you have more than one event (i.e. collision) within each nanosecond window. You end up with detector readings for each event overlapping each other without a simple way of disambiguating them. This is called "pile up".
When I last worked there in 2015 a typical pile up situation was having about 50 collisions per detector reading. It is no simple problem to simultaneously reconstruct 50 collisions from the same set of overlapping detector measurements.
From what I've heard, the amount of pile-up ATLAS and CMS can handle is limited by the CPU time it takes to reconstruct events, which can be alleviated by throwing more resources at it, but it is much better to develop quicker reconstruction algorithms.
Towards the end of last year, they had to start levelling the instantaneous luminosity to 75% of what they could achieve,† primarily to reduce the load on the grid.
† Edit: the maximum peak luminosity is still 200% of the design value, so the performance is beyond initial expectations.
To be fair, 50 PU is above design peak luminosity, much less mean. And I'm sure I've seen plots from both ATLAS and CMS at the end of LS1 that show improvements in the processing time at 100 PU by factors of roughly 10.
Just to insert the usual analogy, if a single collision is the proverbial smashing of two clocks, and then trying to discern their makeup from the wreckage, this is akin to smashing dozens of clocks at the same time. How can you tell where one gear fragment was meant to fit when it’s such a mess?
One thing that might help is that the collision vertex is slightly different each time. If you already had all of the tracks reconstructed, you'd find that you could point them together into n different centers of mass from which they originated.
Vertex finding is the first step in most track reconstruction algorithms. But it's still very difficult. The number of trajectories that can be formed from discrete points blows up combinatorically. When you have hundreds of thousands of points you usually don't end up with a few easy to find vertices.
Isn't that what a line of credit is? Or a debit card? It's got a history of spending, it's very hard to double spend, and its completely traceable?
Sometimes I think fed has learned from Bitcoin that they don't trust us with Bitcoin, and they shouldn't trust us with cash either. I don't feel like they really give a shit about what a distributed ledger actually accomplishes and how it protects users.
Additionally, mining. Mining is a huge problem in my eyes because it wastes a ridiculous amount of energy to not produce anything. I'd love to just buy-in with my credit card or with cash, and have those coins generated (until supply is depleted) to meet the value at that time. If fedcoin worked like that, that'd be neat. Otherwise, it's just an energy sink, and I think we should start being more conscious at where all this energy is going.
Side question, HNers who use Bitcoin, why are you using bitcoin? Why aren't you using monero? If it's just convention, then switch! That's how conventions change!
I understand your frustration, but in a world with a dozen different languages to choose from for cross platform native desktop apps, there's very rarely a case to be made for electron even existing.
I'm not trying to prove your point by making the insufferable comment that you hate and already expect, so please understand I am genuinely interested:
Why would, or why should, a person interested in creating a cross platform desktop app, choose electron?
If it's just to use their favorite web components to design with, is that really a good enough reason? When GTK and Qt both provide js api capabilities, what else is there to gain?
Please understand, I'm not a web developer, I'm not familiar with most of it, but just the thought of 100+MB overhead for an app is completely unacceptable to me. But again, the benefit of using web tech is lost on me.
Apart from VSCode, I'm also not a fan of Electron - but I do understand why people use it.
> When GTK and Qt both provide js api capabilities, what else is there to gain?
It's the HTML5. How would you write an xplat editor with GTK or QT? The obvious answer is to use Scintilla and after some Googling surrounding getting that right, you're successful! Now you want to start innovating the editor, with both the speed and bravery that the VSCode team do. Now you have problems.
As much as I despise HTML5, it does provide a canvas that behaves consistently across platforms (so long as your browser is consistent, which Electron is). I can't see why you'd use it for a music app or so forth, but rendering a text editor is a surprisingly difficult task - it does present genuine benefit in this field.
You could use OpenGL or Vulkan, but then you'd spend your life writing the UI framework and wouldn't have the xplat layer that NodeJS offers.
So what electron developers appreciate is an easily accessible markup+canvas?
Text editors are a great example, they're very difficult to get right.
I wonder why more desktop GUI platforms aren't equipped with something similar to html5->native markup.
Thanks for your comment, that clears up the question of appeal for me a bit. I can see how much frustration is saved in a project like vscode by using electron.
I'm personally a bigger fan of XAML (done right, with MVVM) for that purpose, but it's unrealistic because XAML is dead. So ultimately I agree, there should be a browser of sorts for highly trusted apps. Electron is a runtime, it shouldn't be bundled with every app that uses it.
I have done years of web dev, including modern React UI, as well as years in the past with Java Swing and Qt/C++, so I have a little perspective here. Electron offends my sensibilities for precisely the reasons you outlined. However, these are my thoughts:
1. It enables a large swatch of people that have never done desktop development (which has a learning curve that is hard to climb if you aren't paid to do it) to build cool stuff and ship it. Without Electron, we'd be left with nothing. If nothing is truly better than something with Electron, then this won't be a compelling point. However I'd rather have stuff that I ignore than to not have stuff.
2. Performance in electron can be decent. It isn't always because of bloat and poor implementation, but that can be true of native apps as well (especially java-based ones). The download size is laughable, but hard drives are reasonably sized these days so this is less of a pragmatic concern, and more of an ideological purity concern.
3. The modern paradigm that React brings to the table can genuinely be a better dev experience than the traditional frameworks. The benefits of "always re-render" would have fixed numerous bugs that I dealt with in UI land regarding state and dealing with changing state. Developer happiness is worth a lot when the project is open-source, unfunded, and done by someone with passion (which is how almost all open source starts).
4. I think it's temporary. There's projects like Proton that are already looking at how to get the best of React/JS on the desktop without the bloat of shipping a web browser with your app. The future looks bright.
NOTE for people devving on electron: Please be more conscious of memory usage and potential memory leaks. Desktop apps are often long-running and you've got to pay attention to resource usage and the memory leak traps that can cause your app to gobble up insane amounts of memory (cough slack cough)
Thanks for these! Proton is interesting, I think the space has a lot of potential.
I'm concerned that someday html might be the standard for gui system markups, that could go wrong easily.
Part of my perspective on this, maybe yours as well, is the amount of projects in electron that just didn't need to exist in the first place. Guys writing email clients, for example. Nobody is going to use something like that. Casual users will prefer the browser and power users need mega-apps like Thunderbird to be productive enough.
I've been hoping Elm guy would try and bring Elm to Qt or OpenGL or something like that. I think desktop apps have a lot to learn from FRP, which is prevalent in web tech, or at least more so than it has been in the past.
It almost reminds me of Emacs, ya know? Everything and the kitchen sink, and the plumber, and his truck, and the Home Depot. Unnecessary!
Anyways thanks for your comments. Your experience is helpful!
Definitely, and thank you for your perspective! I totally agree WRT FRP. I have a friend that swears by FRP on Android. I believe he uses RxJava and RxKotlin.
I've programmed in Electron and GTK (about 8 years ago), so can only compare those two.
GTK claims to be cross platform, but the windows support is (at least was), awful. Lots of special casing required. Also hi dpi screens never worked right. Also just getting tge dev environment configured on mac, windows and linux was a multi day undertakung and required weird dodgy mingw gcc builds.
With electron, the multi platform is taken seriously. It just works. Also, because electron doesnt try to look like each OS's default toolkit, your app looks the same in all 3 major OSes, so you dont need piles of os specific GUI fine tuning code.
> because electron doesnt try to look like each OS's default toolkit, your app looks the same in all 3 major OSes
That's a significant selling point actually. When I did Qt and also Swing, this was something that got me often. Making something look just right with polish gets to be quite difficult without having tons of platform specific code and logic.
There aren't a dozen different languages. I'm not even sure that there's a single one with an attractive story on Windows + macOS + Linux. Gtk doesn't work well on anything other than Linux/Unix (not macOS).
So it's mostly Qt vs Electron. Having to compile different binaries for every Linux distro and version makes Qt a non-starter for most. And if you're going to compile it statically to try to avoid that dynamic linking nightmare, you just added more bloat to your download than Electron.
Qt is hardly a popular toolkit for Windows and macOS apps.
And if I use Electron and React, I get to add native-ish mobile apps for little extra work by using React Native there.
Because most cross-platform desktop GUI kits are terrible. Everything that's not paid requires a lot of fiddling with C++ bindings and obscure build scripts. Electron is built on Chrome which has billions of dollars backing it. If you want something that's easy to use (and not having to spend too much time thinking about license compliance), looks pretty and works well, your options are pretty limited. Say what you must about Google and profiting from ads but electron is one of the only few full-featured GUI frameworks that allows for simple statically linked app distribution. For free.
Also, ships don't just go to waste when they reach EOL, if they do. They get scrapped, similar to a car I guess, but a lot of material can be reused or recycled or sold, and so on.
Anyways yeah, giant tugs, not a good idea. Not a good use of resources.