goofballlogic's comments

Love reading this stuff. When I grow up I want to be a C programmer.

Strange article. The add-on libraries described aren't necessary at all.

Being "a Manager" is the wrong first step to leading a team. Management is an activity we should all be undertaking, not a role.

I do hope that this works. One major concern I have is being badly burned by using Xamarin when it was a couple of years (4?) old. I hope they don't do that to github. Xamarin wasn't very elegant back then when those guys started it - it was a horrid hack. That makes me worried.

I try not to do this as I never bought into the idea of evolving a prototype into a production app.

My first prototypes tend to be in create-react-app with session-storage (state dies with browser session). I publish this as entirely static content on Amazon S3 (via CloudFront).

After that if the use case seems solid I choose the appropriate tech for the job

I try not to do this as I never bought into the idea of evolving a prototype into a production app.

My first prototypes tend to be in create-react-app with session-storage (state dies with browser session).

After that if the use case seems solid I choose the appropriate tech for the job

I have to agree with @rado on this one. The article presents this as a "code" vs "UI" debate when really it's a "web" vs "app" debate.

Although we use the web as an application platform, it was designed for information interchange, and evolved to support "an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system." Those are often two quite different things. An application platform focuses on "component semantics" whereas the concept of an "Internet-scale" application focuses on "connector semantics".

"Not only is the set of input controls really small, but these controls have almost no functionality associated with them." - yes and that's a useful attribute if you are architecting "internet-scale" applications (think hypermedia, rest, hateoas et al.) because the intent is that each component is dumb enough to be seamlessly switched out with another. In this mindset, a page in a web application does one thing and does it well. It doesn't coincidentally provide retina scanning and 3d imagery (yes, i know...)

Neither the code nor the UI of the web are "solved" problems if you are trying to use it as a traditional application programming platform. You need frameworks and tooling to accomplish that.

I'm not arguing here that it should be this way (although I happen to love the web concept), but the real debate here is about "web" vs "app" - not "code" vs "UI". HTML is designed to facilitate web applications and that will continue to evolve very slowly and deliberately. The alternative is to reimagine web technologies as a traditional application platform from the ground up.

There's still an opportunity for Microsoft to fix this. They definitely have major problems with basic functional requirements at the moment (like reliably displaying messages that another person has sent to you in chat), but there's not really another offering out there with the brand associations that the Skype name comes with.

All they need to do to bring people back is simplify and focus on robustness of the key functions. However, I'm not sure there's much of a business model they could exploit in this way. Using Skype is free. I've used in for about 10 years and in that time I've maybe spent £40 on paid calling. That's not enough to sustain a high quality offering. It only works if consumer market is the entire focus, leveraging the strategies that the like of Facebook employ.

For these reasons, although it wouldn't be hard to fix, I reckon it won't happen. But who knows, Microsoft have done some things in the open source arena over the last five years. Maybe one day they'll run a product like Skype simply for the satisfaction of owning the world's best online calling service (and the money would surely follow).

A json-based format still has some advantages depending on context. E.g. JavaScript code can manipulate JSON data "natively" whereas XML support is far harder to achieve.

Awesome stuff. I'm working with JSON-LD in both C# and JavaScript and loving the freedom that the linked data concepts (constraints) bring to developing APIs.

Also get 500s trying to link