"The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment."
...and then talked a bit about how it's open (yeah, ok, sure), and then you said it's not really a good application development environment (obviously).
I'm saying, your entire premise is wrong: it isn't an application development environment, any more than a box of legos is a "housing development environment". People have built houses out of legos, but that doesn't make "lego" a building material. It's a big, messy, nasty hack.
The fact that it's "open" is a non-sequitur response to "it's the wrong tool for the job", which is what the OP (and I, and elviejo) are arguing. It's also not a legitimate response to argue that any re-thinking of the model has to come from a company, or otherwise not be "open".
The reason that web apps happened is because web apps started as a hack. That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model.
(Realistically, the reason I'm getting downvoted probably has more to do with my willingness to call out React as a pile of garbage than with the substance of the greater argument. C'est la vie...it's actually pretty amusing to watch the comment fluctuate between -3 and +3...)
Here's the crux of our disagreement. You believe that the web is such a broken application platform that it is possible to convince enough vendors and people to get behind a better solution. However, I (despite your presumptuous implication that I'm a millenial), have been around long enough to know that will never happen. Web standards will continue iterating, and companies will continue building apps on the web, even the most powerful app platforms today such as iOS and Android for all their market power can not stop this force. The reason is because it's a platform that works. The man-millenia behind the web can not be reproduced and focused into a single organized effort. You might as well argue that we replace Linux with Plan 9, it doesn't matter how much passion you have and how sound your technical argument is, Linux, like the web, is entrenched. It's gone beyond the agency of individual humans and organizations to become an emergent effect.
That's not to say that the web might not some be supplanted by something better, but it won't come because of angry engineers wringing their hands about how terrible the web is. It will come from something unexpected that solves a different problem, but in a much simpler and more elegant way, and over time it will be the thin edge of the wedge where it evolves and develops into a web killer.
Maybe I'm just cynical and lack vision, perhaps you can go start a movement to prove me wrong. I'll happily eat my hat and rejoice at your accomplishments when that time comes.
"That's not to say that the web might not some be supplanted by something better..."
Whomever wrote the first paragraph of your comment should get in touch with the person who wrote the second paragraph.
OK, seriously, though, let's summarize:
1) Person says "web development sucks, here's why: $REASONS"
2) You reply: "it's the only truly cross-platform development environment ever"
3) I (and others) reply: "no, it really isn't. it isn't even a development environment, by any reasonable measure."
Now you're putting words in my mouth about convincing vendors and starting movements. I'm not trying to start a revolution here, just trying to counter the notion that we can't do any better than the pile of junk we've adopted. You don't have to love your captors!
I have no idea if someone will come up with a revolutionary, grand unified solution tomorrow, but I know that this process starts with the acknowledgement that what we have sucks, and that we have lots of examples of better solutions to work from. Hell...just having a well-defined set of 1995-era UI components defined as a standard would be a quantum leap forward in terms of application development.
So.. app stores?
It has already begun. The most popular webapps (Facebook, Twitter etc.) already have native clients in Android and iOS. I believe the majority of people already prefer and use the native FB/Twitter apps more often than accessing the FB/Twitter websites. So it's already obvious that native apps must be more convenient.
Right now however, app stores are a little clumsier to navigate compared to browsers.
For webapps:
• you have to open the browser,
• type in the address OR
• use a web search if you don't know the exact address.
But for apps:
• you have to open the app store,
• search for the app,
• potentially filter through unofficial third-party software,
• download the app, possibly after entering your credentials,
• navigate to the app icon,
• authorize any security permissions on startup (in the case of Android or badly-designed iOS apps.)
We just need the Big Three (Apple/Google/Microsoft) to actively acknowledge that app stores can supplant the-web-as-application-platform, and remove some of those hurdles.
Ideally an app store would be akin to searching for a website on Google.com (or duckduckgo.com) with a maximum of one extra click or tap between you and the app.
Apps should also be incrementally downloadable so they're immediately available for use just like a website, and Apple already has begun taking steps toward that with App Thinning.
Ultimately there's no reason why the OS and native apps shouldn't behave just like a web browser, because if web browsers keep advancing and evolving they WILL eventually become the OS, and the end result will be the same to what I'm suggesting anyway.
Currently though, both the native OS side and the web side exist in a state of neither-here-nor-there, considering how most people actually use their devices.
Bad stuff seems to win because it's more evolutionarily adapted than well thought out stuff. This happens to hold for programming languages too.
The recent cross-communication between JavaScript, Elm, and Clojure has been incredibly fruitful but hasn't been noticed by the bitter die-hards. And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp community hadn't been dismissive, arrogant douchebags that considered JavaScript a worthless toy language.
What's truly sad is that some people would rather be abstractly right while producing nothing of value than work with the dominant paradigm and introduce useful concepts to it.
A common defensive mechanism among people with outdated skills is to try to delegitimize new frameworks and technologies in the hopes of convincing the broader community not to use things they don't know.
I'm inferring this from your arguments being driven by analogies and insinuations rather than concrete critique. It's not my intention to attack you personally, but an aggressively dismissive attitude towards unfamiliar concepts should be properly contextualized.
As for React, isn't it more likely that you don't know React very well, have never looked at its internals, and in general don't feel like you have the time or ability to learn much about modern web development?
If you build a few projects with React and still dislike it, good! Your critiques will be a lot more valid and useful at that point, whereas right now...yeah.
The web is a joke of an app platform. Those of us who have wider experience of different kinds of programmings see some web devs struggling with this concept and conclude, I think quite reasonably, that the only plausible explanation is lack of experience. This is not due to "outdated skills" - I daresay everyone criticising the web as a platform in this thread has, in fact, written web apps. It's the opposite problem. It's to do with developers who haven't got the experience of older technologies having nothing to compare it too, so "web 2.2" gets compared to compared to "web 2.0" and it looks like progress.
And in case you're tempted to dismiss me too, I recently tried to write an app using Polymer. It sucked. The entire experience was godawful from beginning to end. Luckily the app in question didn't have to be a web app, so I started over with a real widget toolkit and got results that were significantly better in half the time.
> My point was that you can't create a proper application
> development environment that is both an open and defacto
> standard the way the web is.
In addition to the countless examples posted in this thread, I would argue that if it's nearly impossible to create your own implementation of a platform or standard from scratch, then it's not really open in a practical sense. Who cares if the specs are available if it takes dozens or hundreds of man years to deliver a passable implementation?