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596 points pimterry | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.672s | source
1. 0xbadcafebee ◴[] No.36863054[source]
I am actually rooting for the web to die, so I say bring on all the competition-killing features Google can muster. It's only in the face of an extreme and impossible choice that people will finally wake up. Giving up the entire user-facing compute ecosystem to a hypertext markup viewer has held back technological advancement for nearly two decades. Computer chips are now 4 nanometers and solid state storage is reaching the speed of RAM. But we're still churning out platform content line-by-line, by hand, like digital punch cards, because apparently it's technologically impossible to invent the equivalent of PowerPoint for web pages, or, god fucking forbid, not using HTML, CSS, and JS to create customer-facing applications.

Yes, the web is a great success story. But it's also backwards and ancient, and has been limping along by stuffing an entire operating system into a program made for viewing hypermedia. Are we going to wait 20 years to advance past these limitations? 40 years? 100 years? At what point will people finally fucking say "hey, maybe let's not kill ourselves jumping through hoops just to show pictures of cats and tax prep programs?"

replies(1): >>36863655 #
2. pphysch ◴[] No.36863655[source]
You have over 16000 karma on this here orange site. You do realize it will follow the cat pics and tax prep programs to oblivion, right?
replies(1): >>36866709 #
3. 0xbadcafebee ◴[] No.36866709[source]
I would give all my karma for the rest of my life if it could convince the industry to make it easier for average humans to create things faster, easier, and better, without writing code.

Do graphics designers have to write code to create a poster for a concert? Do executives have to write code to create a powerpoint slide? Do financial analysts have to write code to balance taxes in excel? Do students have to write code to compose rich-text formatted documents? Do kids have to write code to create entire cities in minecraft? No, no, no, no, no. But if you want to create a personal home page, hoooo boy, get ready to learn 3 SaaS services, 5 languages, 7 frameworks, 14 tools, and 28 paradigms.

When I was 16 and found Visual Basic, I created a networked, graphical application for sharing homework in about a week. Not knowing anything about programming. That is what we should be doing to make applications. Not fucking around with god damn HTML, CSS, JS, Flask, Squashify, Zentillion2, Uberstuber, Flimflam Candygram 4.0, and more. Just give me Visual Basic that will compile for a phone, tablet, and a desktop. We could get so much more done with much fewer people, time wasted, complexity, cost. We wouldn't be beholden to "the web". Computers could actually grow to do more than is allowed by the "browser ecosystem", if we didn't have to use browsers to make and run apps.