The problem with the suggestions here is that it puts all your eggs in the same basket. 1Password TOTP? If both your password and the TOTP are in your password manager, you arguably really just have a single factor, delegated to a third party (your password manager). PassKeys? Same problem. Storing your recovery keys in your password manager? You again just have 1 factor.
SMS is bad and should go away, but it isn't so clear what the replacement needs to be for most people.
I'd say Electron apps would exist regardless of the native toolkit quality. The business case is that you're probably already building a website, and if that's the case, why not offer native apps too with almost no added development time? The value of Electron is that you don't have to hire development teams for each platform.
And yes, Windows development is a mess. Mac less so. KDE and Gnome have their strengths and weaknesses. Ask around the average Mac, Gnome, and Windows user what they think of Electron apps. Windows users are probably the most positive, because their desktop experience is garbage anyway.
Does that make JavaScript actually better? Win32/WPF/UWP meet Angular/KendoUI/Sencha. React and Vue are slightly less messy, admittedly. But it's still a very fragmented landscape.
> However, assertions that web apps are inherently inferior and that web apps are only written by people who couldn't bother to learn native technologies is at best ignorant and at worst lacking empathy with the requirements and constraints, and in turn with end users empowered with choice.
Well, "inferior" is always a subjective claim. The real problem with Electron, besides perhaps resource consumption, is that web apps are not native apps and native apps have all kinds of idioms, integrations, etc. A selling point of Electron is that it has "native menus." That's it. Just native menus.
They do not have, for example, proxy icons. They usually don't have system-wide services integration. They can't be automated with AppleScript. The print dialog are almost always weird, etc.
There are similar idioms on Gnome, KDE, etc. Think about header bars or Adwaita in Gnome. Or ssh filesystem support in KDE.
All these things make users more productive. If you really know your way around a desktop environment, and you know all the tricks, you can be massively productive with native apps. You'll never be similarly productive, however, with even the best Electron apps.
The mistake the author is making here is conflating a "good" app in isolation with a good app in a desktop environment. An Electron app which is an amazing app in isolation, with thoughtful design and efficient code and useful features, is always a bad app in any actual desktop environment. Putting an Electron app in MacOS or Gnome or KDE is like putting gummy bears in tacos or lasagna. Gummy bears are good. Tacos are good. But they don't belong together.
So where are Electron apps actually good? I'm guessing ChromeOS. Otherwise, they always kind of suck, even the $25k Electron apps at Bloomberg. And while I hesitate to make blanket statements, I have yet to use a single Electron app I actually want to use, ever. They're always, and this is without exception, garbage on any desktop environment I actually want to use. Full stop.
The account recovery process for commercial email providers usually involves you photographing your ID. Presumably the post office, in person, would be far less likely to be fooled.
The walrus operator is nice, except in comprehensions. f-strings are great, except for the `=` debugging operator. Dictionary merging and update operators contradict the "one way to do it" with weird and confusing syntax that's completely redundant to methods that already exist.
Type hints are a sore spot for me. They're good enough when you just don't remember whether an argument is an object or a string, for example, but once you start type hinting deep into data structures, your hints become a mangled soup of nonsense for basically no real benefit. Typing errors are a rare occurrence—perhaps once a year in most projects—yet we clutter our codebases with verbosity to satisfy type checkers instead of prioritizing clarity for developers.
There's a lot that's just straight up redundant. Dicts are ordered now, but is OrderedDict deprecated? No, because it's just slightly different in weird and mostly unimportant ways. `frozenset` is a builtin, for all 3 programmers worldwide who use it. Python resisted match/case syntax for decades, but when it finally arrived, it did so in a way that’s anything but standard—good luck figuring it out without consulting the documentation.
Obviously some improvements are real. Every new version of Python brings valuable enhancements. But just go back to Python as it used to be -- pseudocode that runs. That's just not true anymore. The simplicity has slipped away and will never ever come back.
And the standard library? A very real problem, right now, in computer security is the software supply chain. Remember polyfill from like, yesterday? This is the era when we should double down on having a million dependencies from all over GitHub, from unknown developers with no commitment, because ... npm's hellscape is a model to follow?
I would argue the contrary. There's dependency hell, of course, but there's also dependency risk. If you were evaluating a product right now, and you saw its lockfile depended only on a specific version of the Python Standard Library, that gives you exactly 1 product to evaluate, exactly 1 team of developers to depend on. pip is great and all, but dependency resolvers have quietly let in a hundred trojan horses and a thousand unmaintained dependencies into tons of projects, and no one noticed it was even happening.
Python in 2005, when everyone depended on the standard library, was a safer place than npm is today.
It was happening a lot under Guido too, but IMO, Python was arguably a better language (at least in some ways) 10, 15, even 20 years ago. Python's three super powers were readability, simplicity, and a vast standard library that negated the need for most projects to seek out third party modules.
All three of those have declined. It's less readable than it used to be, it's definitely more complicated (not just complex, complicated), and the standard library is declining rapidly in relevance as it ages.
And it wasn't just Guido. Tim was a big advocate for all three of those super powers when he was more influential. They banned Tim and they censored Guido, so go figure.
Pretty much every heavy traveler I know strives for carryon only. It isn’t always possible and sometimes you check a bag, but if you can do it, the benefits are real.
It’s mostly just that you want to travel light. It gives you more freedom of movement and flexibility to have just one suitcase or backpack. But that means everything from your computer to your prescription drugs to your socks and underwear is in there, so checking it isn’t an option if you travel light.
Runtime and download time are two different things.
Pyodide runs at least ~10MB. That's a lot for a web app to handle, for sure. The use case there is most likely either scientific computing/data science (where JavaScript is just an obvious non-starter), or it's line of business somewhere where someone downloads an ERP app and just runs it. Those are already huge, as anyone who uses the stuff from ERP companies can attest.
No one is seriously proposing that you should use Pyodide, with the whole Python standard library, to add interactivity to a regular newspaper website or something like that.
MicroPython might be a good fit for that though. It's ~100k -- smaller than a lot of JS tooling.
But usually when we say "fast language" or "slow language," we're talking execution speed, not runtime size.
You're replacing one interpreted language for another.
Yes, Python is among the slower interpreted languages out there, but still. The debate between fast execution and programmer productivity is not a new one. Given Python's popularity, I'd say it's settled.
If I may toot my own horn, I wrote a somewhat more opinionated, reactive, frontend framework using PyScript. It's inspired by Vue.js, a bit: https://puepy.dev
PyScript can use Pyodide or MicroPython. MicroPython is actually quite small.
On top of the runtime, PyScript gives you some pleasantries and a lot of quality-of-life improvements for actually using Python for web programming, not just being able to run Python code.
If the military has fighters that can refuel in the air, why does United refuel on the ground like chumps?
First of all, sometimes even AWS makes mistakes and has downtime. They have downtime (usually unplanned) fairly often. Companies like VISA, that do payment processing, where countless dollars could be lost in just a few minutes of downtime, almost never update their old systems. They still have programs running FORTRAN. When they do update, it's complicated.
You can try to get really good uptime by doing things like forking your database and replicating your commit log to the fork. You can do rolling updates, where different customers are served different versions of a system. You can do extremely thorough testing.
But are you? Can you afford to do that and do you even have the engineering talent to make it happen even if you want to? Are you going to pass on new business opportunities and new features just to avoid a 20 minute downtime for a database migration at 2am? I suspect you are not.
SMS is bad and should go away, but it isn't so clear what the replacement needs to be for most people.