Case in point: Notice that the web technology stack is really complex. So are the native GUI toolkits on all mature platforms. And something like wxWidgets that wraps all those toolkits is its own kind of complexity. "I know, I'll implement my own beautifully simple UI toolkit and bind it to the core graphics and input APIs on each platform." Congratulations; your beautifully simple solution is going to be off limits to some users, because you haven't handled accessibility, internationalization, etc. So some of that complexity you wanted to avoid was necessary after all. But maybe we can still categorically reject the web stack for applications that don't actually run in a browser.
I think you are not stepping back far enough to look at the problem. Are you actually suggesting the entire complexity of the current web-stack (html, css, js and server side code) is essential to make web-apps?
I wasn't clear. I know there's a lot of incidental complexity in the web stack. But I'm afraid that some developers, in response to a stirring call to simplicity such as this manifesto, will go too far, blissfully unaware that some of the complexity of mature UI toolkits (not just the web stack, but also the native toolkits of mature platforms) is actually necessary.
It looks like you're making a point that these things are all inherently complex.
Isn't it more probable that the tools we have today are just inadequate to deal with those problems? And maybe they are still inadequate after all these years because our industry is very stubborn and doesn't learn from its mistakes?
I see nothing complex about drawing interactive elements on the screen. Smalltalk with its Morphic interface offers a much richer and flexible GUI toolkit and that was out when, in the 60s? How many GUI toolkits have learned from those lessons? And Morphic/Smalltalk was cross-platform before Java, in ways Java isn't to this day. It seems to me what hampers evolution is the technology we choose (Java, C) and not the problem itself (drawing interactive elements on the screen).
For anyone interested in this discussion I recommend Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet": www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
My point is that the inherent complexity of a UI toolkit is greater than many programmers realize. It's quite easy to implement your own UI that directly draws its controls on the screen and handles mouse clicks. Now, how are you going to make that accessible to blind users? Users with mobility impairments who can't use a mouse? How about right-to-left languages and non-Latin input methods? And there's probably more that I'm not aware of.
Thats true, but there is still plenty of incidental complexity. Poor layout languages with no composition, stateful manipulation of the ui, no way to express components. Tools like React.js and Apple's Auto Layout show that much of this complexity is not actually needed.
