So... What is with this trend of making a web service out of something that ought to be a shell script?
Reminds me of yesterday's hn post about making your PDFs look scanned by... Uploading to a web server that runs a ghostscript command.
It's almost as if locally running software is deeply confusing to people and the perception is that you need to have a potentially privacy violating service if you have a friendly ui. Not to mention all the energy wasted running those servers. Is this how bad our society has gotten at writing software?
In 2020, most people's only device is a cellphone.
They can't easily run ghostscript directly, and making a web service is easier than making an app (recompiling ghostscript for all CPU architectures, ...) despite the ongoing hosting costs.
I feel like the right answer to that is to make ghostscript run on a cell phone. I mean... we're already on Darwin or Linux; the userland is weird, but ex. Termux and iSH proves that you absolutely can run a lot of packages all the same. So in my mind, the real question is: Why does the porting and app development experience suck so much? I mean... HyperCard, in 1987, was usable by non-programmers. A/UX had Commando in 1995, which wrapped CLI in a nice GUI. To hear people rant, the height of RAD GUI building was Visual Basic 5 (1997) or VB6 (1998). Have we really lost that much in the ensuing 25 years?
Reminds me of yesterday's hn post about making your PDFs look scanned by... Uploading to a web server that runs a ghostscript command.
It's almost as if locally running software is deeply confusing to people and the perception is that you need to have a potentially privacy violating service if you have a friendly ui. Not to mention all the energy wasted running those servers. Is this how bad our society has gotten at writing software?