Electron considered harmful
This had me for the first half, where the author walks you through the &#x27;case study&#x27; applications that offer minimal functionality despite shipping with an entire browser inside.<p>But then the essay turns into a rant. It&#x27;s 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn&#x27;t a real programming language. Phrasing the argument the way he does just betrays his smug elitism.<p>The fact is, for many types of applications, Electron is a really good fit: for example, shipping a single-page webapp as a desktop app, a need that surfaces often in today&#x27;s world, despite his derision of this concept.<p>An Electron-wrapped SPA is safer than going to the same website in a multi-tabbed browser and co-mingling your disparate cookies in the same jar, not to mention more convenient for the users, because they can treat it like any other desktop application -- with hardware access, and subject to the OS&#x27; native task management.<p>For other apps, Electron allows the world&#x27;s most popular layout system (HTML+CSS) to be used with one of the world&#x27;s most popular programming languages. This is a huge boon for re-using knowledge, and perhaps does lead to some amateurish projects. Similar criticisms were leveled towards Visual Basic, where drag-and-drop composing and a good IDE enabled people to quickly crank out a GUI app from an idea.