Electron considered harmful
This had me for the first half, where the author walks you through the 'case study' applications that offer minimal functionality despite shipping with an entire browser inside.<p>But then the essay turns into a rant. It's 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn'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'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' native task management.<p>For other apps, Electron allows the world's most popular layout system (HTML+CSS) to be used with one of the world'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.