[Warning, philosophical tangent.]
The thing that strikes me is that it feels like we are doing something
fundamentally wrong if a sensible way to write "Hello, World!" (or
"Hello, I'm a GUI widget!") could possibly be: "Fire up a Linux VM.".
(Or a Docker container...)
I'm not saying the answers in this thread are wrong (I appreciate them,
I have learned a lot, and I think I even have npm installed--though an
unrelated regression stalled my node.js playing today). I am saying the
so-called "full stack" that is trendy these days smells bad and feels
wrong headed.
The binary for a modern-day IRC-type program (Slack) is over 80MB. Sure,
the original IRC didn't have pictures. But 80MB!? I have an internet
radio program (Tunein Radio) that has an install of 65MB.
The Linux kernel--arguably festooned with too many features--is only a
4MB binary on my notebook. And can be trimmed down to about half that
(last I looked) yet still do powerful stuff. It is crazy that Slack is
twenty-times the size of the big version of the kernel.
You might ask: "What's the harm? Storage is cheap!"
I'm not sure, but it feels like this is an infinite supply of security
vulnerabilities, plus a lot of regular feature bugs and much of the
general "computerized things don't work very well".
-kb
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