Time has passed and more importantly Electron based apps lowered the expectations of desktop users.
I use dbeaver (https://dbeaver.io/) as my go-to database tool and it's absolutely fine. Not as snappy as native apps for sure, but between Spotify, Slack and VSCode I can't really complain. I used to... but not anymore.
PHP applications are extremely easy to install and keep running, and Phabricator is probably the cream of the crop in terms of code quality. The devs have done an incredible job with it.
So the answer is "it can be" considered a positive thing.
You can write clean code in any language, and I've written some nice PHP, but the language itself has many fundamental design problems. For example, printf shouldn't have side-effects on a datetime object:
I run some OSS stuff on PHP, but in containers to keep it all isolated. Although things have gotten better with PHP7, knowing what I know about the language makes me hesitant to use it on any new project for anything except the most trivial systems.
That should definetly be fixed, but it's not something people will ever experience unless they try to write broken code by using undocumented features/sideeffects.
What exactly is it you know about the language that makes you hesitant to use it?
It's type system and automatic casting/comparing is a nightmare.
Although there are namespaces now, the idea of everything being in the global scope was insane (and still even with namespaces, much is still in the global scope).
mysql_real_escape_string
There are no type-safe comparisons for greater or less then (You have ===, but no <== or >==).
Pretty much. They took a run at us about 10 years ago. I wrote a sort of semi-popular blog post about figuring out what crypto an app uses by looking for constants for particular crypto algorithms using IDA, and they looked me up in their license database and freaked out publicly because I wasn't registered. We privately pointed out that we were using a letter-coded license on behalf of a client, and they called us liars because they could only think of a few clients they had with such a licensing arrangement (obviously, we weren't in a position to tell them which client it was).
This is, again, for a simple mention of IDA in a public blog post.
After Ilfak left DataRescue to do Hex-rays, his Hex-rays IDA pages kept the one blacklisting the dude they had caught pirating.
Amusingly, the DataRescue IDA page is basically only about piracy now:
They're very difficult to deal with. Renewing my license which was in my name, but at a company I didn't actively work with, was a pain. Even though I had a valid email address at the company in question (part owner). They wanted the company to verify I was allowed to pay them to buy the product. Took over a week IIRC for me to give them money.
Then, if you lose your downloads (in my case, corrupted file) and your contract expires, you're out of luck. Since they make a separate EXE for each customer, they don't provide any way of getting the software once your support contract ends. Seems silly, considering pirated copies are readily obtainable.
But, they're the best so they can act like this and get away with it.
> To me, this is a little weird. One of the downsides of Webview based apps is that it's harder to align with the native OS look and feel.
I'd agree with that in 2014 but this has been much less of a problem since the last few years. The fast pace of mobile OS's have slowed down to a halt. IOS has pretty much the same looks since version 7, Android since version 5.
The metro/material/flat design fashion has been the best thing for cross platforms apps, be it desktop or mobile, any platform or any framework.
Flutter seems to be at the right place at the right time.
I didn't say it can not be done, but it is just harder.
I develop a lot of cross platform apps using Cordova. While this works pretty well, and indeed in recent years support for this is only becoming better, it remains that Webview based apps always feel just a tad off.
Although I use Python extensively and started to forget about Pascal (ex Delphi guy here), Pascal is a much better beginner language IMO.
Start with Python and you're most likely to be stuck with dynamic typing/runtime mindset and it'll distance you too far away from OS level native land.
OTOH starting with Pascal, you'll learn a great deal of low level (well, relatively) stuff and that will make you appreciate the higher level languages when the time comes and will let you leverage them more efficiently. Also as a bonus, a big bonus I think, Pascal will let you feel at home if you ever need C/C++/D in your career.
This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.
You're letting your personal politics cloud the facts. Firefox was struggling well before that point, not because it was bad but because Google was pouring enormous amounts of money into Chrome and the only way you don't lose in that situation is if the competition screws up.
Firefox had a big decade because Microsoft put IE on a starvation diet after Netscape folded but Google shows no sign of making a similar level of error. Firefox has never been better technically but at the end of the day they're fighting on the wrong side of a war which will be decided by budgets.
I don't buy it. Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone. And in a market for engineers that currently favors labor, do you really want to be on the wrong side of the social issues that your staff generally care about? Maybe they would have left to work on Chrome if Eich had stayed. That doesn't even speak to the myriad technical and resource issues that Mozilla faced prior to that particular incident.
Unlike the post linked below, I am not anonymous (it's very easy to figure out who I am) and I am verifiably a former employee of the Mozilla Corporation.
And if you think it's as simple as "political correctness"... I don't even know how to begin talking to you.
Remember: we're not talking about someone "just expressing an opinion" here (as many discussions tried to claim at the time). Brendan didn't just say something, or write something: he actively worked to have his personal opinion -- of whose lifestyle was acceptable and whose lifestyle wasn't -- written into the fundamental law of the state where Mozilla is headquartered. And that opinion, once it became law, hurt employees of the company he was trying to lead, and told them they were effectively second-class citizens.
Such a complete and utter lack of regard for one's fellow humans is disqualifying no matter how much "technical prowess" someone might have. His only choices at that point were to come back in line with the bare-minimum requirements of a free society (such as equality of all people before the law), or be shown the door. And any attempt to dismiss that as "political correctness" reveals a lot about the nature of the person attempting to dismiss it.
Don't kid yourself. Firefox was losing long before Eich left and was even more technically inferior relative to its competitors at the time of his departure.
Stop spreading misinformation. Brendan Eich left Mozilla of his own free will. You're lying when you claim he was "forced out". Quite the contrary. They begged him to stay.
"Since then, there has been a great deal of misinformation. Two facts have been most commonly misreported: 1. Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board respects his decision." [1]
The only people who were "forced out" against their will were the Californian citizens who were forced out of their existing legal same-sex marriages, thanks to the anti-gay propaganda than Brendan Eich willingly and unapologetically paid for.
You're the one who is choosing to propagate the political correctness of homophobic politicians fighting against marriage equality, by misstating the facts and parroting lies to make a politically motivated point in the defense of bigotry, then projecting your own political correctness onto other people.
And you're also wrong to believe that he could have steered the ship away from where it was inextricably headed. Or do you honestly believe that homophobes are the growth market for web browsers, so as a high profile anti-gay-marriage pro-Prop-8 poster child, his bigotry-inclusive outreach to countries like Indonesia, which he claims have many oppressed gay-marriage opponents who support him but don't "have quite the megaphone", could have turned the ship around? [2]
"Now, in his first interview on the subject, Eich is responding with a message that Mozilla is at its core inclusive -- not just of gay-marriage supporters but also of people like him or gay-marriage opponents in Indonesia who also are part of the Mozilla cause."
"For Mozilla, it's problematic because of our principles of inclusiveness, because the Indonesian community supports me but doesn't have quite the megaphone."
Eich also stressed that Firefox worked globally, including in countries like Indonesia with "different opinions," and LGBT marriage was "not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect." [3]
"Actually, Mr. Eich, right now we’re in a world where you have to not be a bigot if you want to be an effective leader of an organization like Mozilla. And it’s about time."
I use dbeaver (https://dbeaver.io/) as my go-to database tool and it's absolutely fine. Not as snappy as native apps for sure, but between Spotify, Slack and VSCode I can't really complain. I used to... but not anymore.