This is sort of a rant post, but I wanted to also bounce it off you guys because I've heard this kind of flak from the web community a lot, and it's so ignorant that my jaw almost hits the floor every time. This is just an example, but I've seen these types of articles surface several times now and they seem to be fostering ignorance across the web dev community unfortunately. What's your view on it? Mine's simple: These technologies will all co-exist with each other and be used for the appropriate use-case. IMO "X is BETTER than Y" in tech is an extremely immature way to look at things in tech and nearly always wrong.

Slightly related to this, insomniac games decided a few years ago to move their dev environment to web tools. They found that web just doesn't cut it on the scale needed for a AAA game. In GDC they gave a talk about it the slides can be found here: https://deplinenoise.wordpress.co...-insomniacs-web-tools-postmortem/

Tl;dr is that you can do such things in web but you need to approach it like you would a native app if you want things to scale properly. Stick to a single framework, don't chase a moving target (fix browser version), have good rules about code that gets added into production, ...

In such a large codebase (300k lines) you need static semantic checking so a typo doesn't result in a crash and you can refactor without leaving undefined function pointers everywhere.

In the Todd's link, most of the comments about native apps are about smartphone's apps. Most of the android apps are very simple, and often they are interfaces to web services. Personally, I don't see much difference between a web apps and an android apps.

He is not talking about desktop applications or server side applications.

People are very good at looking at the stuff they don't work on and seeing how terrible it is. The writer is a JavaScript programmer. If he were a C, Swift, Java, (insert tool here) programmer, that article would come to very different results using the same data.

This is how the world works.