- Both Angular and VB make it easy to get a "pretty" GUI up and running quickly.
- Both Angular and VB require quite a bit more knowledge to make a more sophisticated application beyond a simple interface.
- There are plenty of other languages that are difficult to get even a simple example up and running, but tend to force certain organization and partitioning from the start.
So it is always necessary to have "high level of understanding discipline, and organization to produce high quality large-scale products." It just seems to me that Angular (like VB) is extra easy for simple things and extra hard for sophisticated things.
A specific example - Angular directives. You can happily code for quite awhile without defining your own. Until one day you decide to integrate another library and then need to "wrap" all of your code.
Another example, Angular is described as working with jQuery (which it does). However, if you don't understand Angular's event loop and start doing jQuery stuff outside of it, mayhem ensues.
Kind of thought that Angular is a bit like VB <cue shrieks and screams>.
Both allow relative novices to produce sophisticated GUIs rather quickly. Both require a fairly high level of understanding discipline, and organization to produce high quality large-scale products. Frankly, GWT sort of fits that description as well.
The problem with spreadsheets is not a simple issue of good vs. bad. Spreadsheets have an extremely flexible and well accepted if not intuitive interface. The problem is that they do not provide visibility into what processing is occurring, require a lot of error-prone manual manipulation, and are difficult to audit. As such, they are not really designed for testing and disciplined business processes that ensure accuracy and data integrity. You can't have complete flexibility as well as rigid controls.
One solution is to recognize when a given spreadsheets usage has increased to a point where it - or some portion of its functionality - would be better embedded in an application. Another is to have some users adopt a environment/language like R which addresses the short-comings listed above at the expense of being more complicated and less user-friendly. But there is no simple solution that is going to result in spreadsheets disappearing from use.
Reminds me of another quote from C.S. Lewis (who was cited in the article) on the subject.
"Even on those rear occasions when a modern undergraduate is not attending some such society he is seldom engaged in those solitary walks, or walks with a single companion, which built the minds of the previous generations. He lives in a crowd; caucus has replaced friendship."
- C.S. Lewis from the essay "Membership" in "The Weight of Glory"
Part of Chrome's appeal is its as an IDE for web development. Technical support is also more difficult where an end user cannot easily locate a URL. Hiding URLs by default is going to detract from the value of Chrome for a technical audience.
The "HN is not like the good old days" refrain has been around for years of course. But seeing a comparison of HN from a few years ago compared with a recent front page is pretty stark. That's why - though what is a political is a judgement call - I would be OK with a moderator making an informed if somewhat arbitrary call.
Anyway - I appreciate your comment - and many others that I have seen you post over time.
The fact that you are a programmer is exactly the reason R feels funny. Its predecessor (S) was originally just supposed to be an interactive interface for some Fortran libraries. It turned out to be useful to folks doing mathematical applications and grew into a language.
Most introductions to R don't cover it in the same way other languages do. I found http://adv-r.had.co.nz/ to be very helpful for clarifying matters in a manner that is more familiar to programmers.
- For example, library() and require() allow you to call them either with or without quotes, because internally they use deparse(substitute(x)) plus a couple of tricks
(http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the-language.html).
One critique - a scientist's identity can be in science itself (or its latest set of widely-held beliefs), which itself can also result in a essentially political/religious response wrapped up in scientific garb. I am thinking of periods of time leading up to a paradigm shift where there can be significant resistance to "where the facts lead" by those invested in defending the status quo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...).
Certainly, this not the same situation as a purely political or religious issue. It is worth noting though, since everyone works off of a basic set of assumptions that are not provable. Each person has a philosophy - a practical "religion" or "political party" regardless of whether they are officially associated with any public entity or institution.