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I'm thinking of building a long term living app (say an app that I will use the next 30 years).

It has to be a web app so I was thinking of going pure JS. With that requirements in mind would you recommend ember.js?


I know this is kind of the contrarian opinion and I'm not trying to be "that guy", but if you want a web app that works in 30 years you would probably be best off building a server-side rendered application. You need a server, HTTP, HTML, and CSS for any web application, but you don't always need a lot of client side javascript.

The fewer things you have in your stack, the fewer things can change under your feet.


Go for web components. It's guaranteed to last 30 years


If you MUST use a framework, then yes i would go with ember because they have a prooved commitment to following the web standards rather than creating their own custom standards that they throw away the next year.

Having said that, 30 years are very VERY long time in web development. Maybe pure js isn't a bad call, but it depends on how large it is going to be. Someone else mentioned considering sever rendering, not a bad cinsideration either.


If you are designing for that kind of long term I suggest looking into SmallTalk. A lot changes in 30 years.


Meh. I don't get the love Lua gets on HN. At least version 5.1, I didn't try the others.

No first class support for OOP, you got to use tables instead.

No "continue" keyword to go to the next iteration of a loop. So you have to use some ugly elseif.

No try catch!

It's a dynamic language so everything goes. A function will return nil or a number or whatever you wish. A function can also returns any number of variables, so obviously some moron will abuse it: looking at you Blizzard intern (you must have been an intern right?) that thought returning 20 variables on the combat event log was a good idea. Ever heard of tables???

The LSP can't do miracles when there are almost no rules so auto-completion is more miss than hit, which is quite shocking in 2024. The IA is helpful sometimes but create subtle bugs some other times. A simple uncaught typo will create a hard to find bug (yesterday copilot auto-completed myObject.Id instead of myObject.id, there went 20 minutes of my life trying to find why some code that was running solidly for weeks was now failing silently).

So all in all, Lua is fine to write small imperative scripts of a few hundred loc. Anything bigger and more complex you should run away IMHO.

I never realized C# was such a well designed language until I tried Lua.


I agree. Also tables are quite weird, and 1-based indexing is definitely a mistake (sorry 1 fans but it is).

I think it just doesn't have much competition in the "embeddable languages" space unfortunately.

As another commenter said, JavaScript is probably the best choice in most cases today.

There's a list of options here but most of them are not really good options usually:

https://github.com/dbohdan/embedded-scripting-languages

E.g. Python would be a terrible choice in most cases. Awk? Some of them aren't even general purpose programming languages like Dhall.

If you narrow it down to embeddable-like-Lua there are hardly any.


> No first class support for OOP, you got to use tables instead.

You get meta tables instead which allow you to trivially write an OOP system that perfectly fits your needs. Yes there is more than class-based OOP.

And I mean trivially: https://lua-users.org/wiki/SimpleLuaClasses

For some people not being locked into one form of OOP or any OOP at all is a huge advantage.

> No "continue" keyword to go to the next iteration of a loop. So you have to use some ugly elseif.

Yeah, that sucks. Thankfully Luau fixes that and basically all annoyances I have with Lua. https://luau.org/syntax

> I never realized C# was such a well designed language until I tried Lua.

Lua and C# have fundamentally different design goals. C# sucks for embedding, you have to include a huge runtime. Godot still hasn't figured out how to support C# on web builds. Lua values minimalism and flexibility. That obviously means it lacks some quality of life features of bigger general purpose languages.

Language design is about trade offs.


As a long time FF user (from v1) I just migrated to Brave for 2 reasons:

- I'm tired of FF sneakily pushing some telemetry / studies / "anonymous ads" whatever even though they already get bilions from Google

- Brave is better at dealing with gdpr popups and ads than FF + ublock

On the other hand, Brave is a joke at managing bookmarks.

I tried Librewolf last year but I had some problems with it (not sure what it was).


You're all going to buy it anyway, so why would they do anything differently?


For example a reader app where you can't host everything on the server. My ebooks collection is 1TB big, and my videos are something like 20TB.


IMHO for personal workstations immutable distros are a solution in search of a problem.

In 3 years using Fedora (which hasn't a reputation for being a stable distro) I once had a bad kernel that prevented my Framework laptop from booting (solved by blacklisting said kernel). All my other Fedora machines were fine.

Why would I need an immutable distro if even Fedora is stable enough? Heck i could use Debian or a RHEL clone and never have to worry about stability.


Because the higher assurance of reproducibility and stability is a starting point that enables other things.

"50% power reliability is enough for anyone, I sometimes don't have to gather firewood"

Its hard to imagine never gathering firewood to heat your home in that reality.

All of this to say that you can make more assumptions and enable things that were not possible before with better reproducibility.


I get your point, but I'm more on the side of "let those enthusiasts get shocked and see in a few years if this electricity thing is really worth it".

I eschew complexity wherever practical. There's so much complexity in modern life, especially for tech people.

Right now mutable Linux is absolutely fine for me, but I'd like to thank all the people that are alpha testing some of the tech I'll adopt later ;)


> Sundhedsdatanettet

What a tongue twister for non danish speaking people :D


It’s even better when you know that the proper pronunciation is essentially “soondhldlddlnl”

(Source: I speak Danish as a second language. I used to think Georgian was the language with the most consecutive consonants but then I learned how little the Danes respect their vowels so now I know better)



"Why Danish sounds funny" is more informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5DPt3Ge_s


In English we would put spaces between parts of a "compound" word.

> Sundheds data nettet

Sund-hed is "sound-ness" (or even "sound-hood"), i.e. health.

> The health data network


Yep. not putting spaces on compound words doesn't twist the tongue but twist the eyes!

Eyetwister


In Norway this is called engelsk orddeling and is a source of gentle amusement, or occasionally outbursts of irritation.

See https://www.diskusjon.no/blogs/entry/878-orddeling-en-engels...


No computers connected to the internet in Swedish hospitals?

If there are, a bridge could be made willingly or not. OFC it's more secure than everything on the internet.


> 7 days a week

IMHO you're risking a burnout and working on your company 0 day a week.

It would be better to be reasonable now than to kill your company in a few years because you can't stand it anymore.

Take this next week-end off and go do something totally "useless" like walking in nature ;) It will recharge you.


I'm absolutely convinced that burnout is a function of spending time on things you loathe to do. Not how much time you spend on something you love doing.

Most people I know that actually work all-the-time, not self-proclaimed "I work X hour weeks people that say it to sound 'cool'" people. Never have a burnout.

Most of those people also go on extended vacations of say 5-7 weeks. But still work 2-3 hours every day.

Burnout seems much more common in the average worker that only works a 9-5.


Just checked my preconceived notions.

The commonality of burnout in some form to full burnout seems to be roughly 75% for employees[1] and roughly 70% for executives[2] and 25% ~ 75% for entrepreneurs[3].

My experience is based mostly on the latter.

[1]: https://www.gallup.com/topic/burnout.aspx / https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/flexjobs-mha-mental-healt... [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2023/01/23... [3]: https://wifitalents.com/statistic/entrepreneur-burnout/

The statistics on this vary wildly, so I'd take all these statistics with a giant grain of salt.


That's a match for my experience so far. Never could have worked this hard for someone else.

Having full creative control, uncapped upside potential, and truly enjoying the work make it a lot easier to do every day.

As a long-term goal, I would like to restore better work/life balance.

But first, I'm trying to make hay while the sun shines, to hit escape velocity from corporate work permanently. Now that I've tasted freedom, I really don't want to be dragged back...regardless of the outcome with my current business.


To me, burnout is putting large amounts of mental and emotional energy into an activity where you don't have much agency on how it is done, or the outcome. That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life. The actual amount of work leading to burnout is only a small component IMO.


Spot on. You don’t get burnout from boring tedious work. That’s a completely different form of exhaustion.

> That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life.

Yeah but it’s not at all limited to traditional work. A common source of burnout is family issues. People burn out taking care of others, especially someone with psychological or substance abuse problems. Or co-dependence, terminal illnesses. Those things can become worse by trying harder, and that’s a potent recipe for burnout.


> You don’t get burnout from boring tedious work

Yep, that's a different thing called bore-out.


Can confirm, I work a 9-5 and have absolutely had projects where writing code felt like pulling teeth and I very much experienced burnout as a consequence of that.

Even now I have a project where I have to fix a bunch of hastily written code and while I’m making progress and it’ll eventually be fine, it’s quite unsatisfying.


Counter point: https://www.devas.life/burned-out/

The guy is clearly passionate about his app, probably too passionate.


That’s an important point. Stress is a key contributor to burnout. It’s very plausible that working 5 unstressed hours 7 days a week doesn’t lead to burnout, while the same amount of work that is stressful and leaves you think about work all day even “off the clock” does lead you to burn out.


Yeah, I don't know. If I love playing guitar, doing it 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, is going to get old. At some point it becomes counterproductive. Sometimes I sit in front of a screen, and I WANT to do something, excited even, but my brain is just not sharp enough.

With coding, it's also a matter of quality of work. You need to step back so you can look at your work with a fresh perspective, and oh, there are ALWAYS horrors you will find, the ones you created when tired.


Not an expert or anything, but when I looked into burnout it was predicted by lack of expected reward. So there's two things you can change. The expectation or the reward.

This matches siblings comments where employees experience burnout more probably because employees are rarely rewarded for their best work. But executives and entrepreneurs are.

I suppose even if the reward is intangible that protects from burnout.


> But executives and entrepreneurs are.

Until they are not. The most promising entrepreneurial project can take an unexpected turn south, and if you’ve worked yourself past the burnout threshold at that point it can be hard to come back.


25k isn't exactly pocket change!


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