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0 pointsEric_WVGG7mo ago0 comments

> The problem isn’t React itself, it’s the React-by-default mindset.

I think this is not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees.

The reason why we’ve been having this discussion for 20+ years is because HTML was not designed to be an app platform. It’s a document standard that we’ve grafted an app ecosystem on top of.

In Windows, Mac, or iPhone software development, there’s One Correct Way to develop apps. Yeah, there’s some fringe technologies — Electron, React Native, is MS Silverlight still a thing? — but when a fresh new developer says “I wanna make an iPhone app” the first thing you do is put a SwiftUI book in front of them.

Back over here in web-land, we’ve been re-inventing the wheel for thirty years. For most of that time, the best advice one could get new devs is to start playing around with javascript and just wing it. React (and specifically NextJS) is the closest thing the web has seen to a SwiftUI or AppKit or DotNet and to say that's a bad thing is bonkers.

IMO anyone who wants radical re-invention and innovation in web should be pushing the W3C into new standards that make interactivity as baked-in as CSS is — that is, turn it into a real application platform — and move toward deprecating Javascript itself.

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Illniyar7mo ago

I don't know about Mac, but windows had WPF, winforms, UWP - all blessed by microsoft (I'm sure I'm missing a few), and often maintained at the same time.

A huge amount of windows apps were built with Java, you had to install the JDK separately - one such thing that comes to mind is Minecraft, another is Jetbrains IDE.

Most of the major native apps you use most often, like browsers, render things directly using DirectX and similar, not to mention games which are made almost entirely in third-party engines that are far from Microsoft display frameworks. (There are also 2-3 competitors to DirectX - such as Vulcan and OpenGL )

And of course there are quite a lot of popular apps that use other frameworks like QT

Eric_WVGGOP7mo ago

I concur that Windows has always been a mess, but at any given point, wasn’t one of those things the “prescribed way” of doings things? Like, I get that Win32 is never going away, and some of the ideas were busts.

The Java phase I think is more analogous to modern React Native and Electron apps.

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