Comment by VyseofArcadia
1 year ago
Interesting. I've done both desktop app dev and web dev professionally, in both cases complex applications that required localization etc. I still found the traditional C++ desktop app a better developer experience. It's significantly more straightforward, and I could be more productive of the simpler mental model of "OS runs application, calls out to thin GUI abstraction layer which calls out to either Cocoa or win32" vs "backend runs on service fabric in one of three different data centers, calls out to x different DBs and y different microservices, user connects to it via frontend after auth (another can of worms) via roughly a dozen different common configurations, but we're only going to test with Chrome on Windows, using TypeScript and an unholy combo of three different frameworks because the frontend team keeps chasing the new hotness"
Web dev just feels insane to me. The amount of logistics and infrastructure and tooling you need[0] is beyond the pale.
[0] "need" is maybe strong, but in an enterprise setting like I was that's what you have
If you don't have to deal with backend in the former scenario it seems that you're really comparing apples to oranges here.
Bad news, I was "full stack". That makes it a real apples-to-apples comparison, as I was also full stack on desktop. Except the stack was shorter. Which was my point.