>Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why?
Because in the time that OP spends tracking down segfaults and getting a dozen native libraries to compile for his native app, the JS dev has already finished XYZ feature. And because the environment is so high level, he can use the extra brain capacity for things like UX, business logic, and accessibility (things people actually care about) rather than meaningless implementation details.
This stuff won out for a reason. HTML/CSS/JS is literally a 10x improvement in iteration speed versus native.
I've been out of the GUI scene for a long time, but I will say I've been hella-impressed with some of the more modern Qt tech.
QML gives you JS for the view layer (and some logic if you desire), and a declarative way to lay out your UI. I think it's worth a comparison as a reasonable way to quickly iterate on a UI while having something very lean and portable as the output product.
Qt is a mix of LGPL for the core, and GPL for some of the "value-add" modules (for which there's a commercial license available for those who can't live with GPL requirements).
> Compared to native development on a single platform? Not even close. HTML/CSS/JS development is painfully slow in comparison.
I find it's often not, largely because the amount of focus on web apps means the native frameworks often are less productive by comparison than what is available for the web.
i don't see why i'd ever spend time on any particular platform when i could avoid it. I don't like any of them, but i still want my software to work on them.
Because in the time that OP spends tracking down segfaults and getting a dozen native libraries to compile for his native app, the JS dev has already finished XYZ feature. And because the environment is so high level, he can use the extra brain capacity for things like UX, business logic, and accessibility (things people actually care about) rather than meaningless implementation details.
This stuff won out for a reason. HTML/CSS/JS is literally a 10x improvement in iteration speed versus native.