My argument is more that the filesystem is a very very very good abstraction to build on and the addition of a network layer exponentially increases complexity and as a result decreases quality.
You can certainly do it, and sometimes it works out just fine, but generalizing all popular software client/server architectures contribute to modern software woes in my opinion (not to mention it discourages privacy! your tailnet example being a good counter-example).
Cross-platform development is another can of worms, and a strong advantage of the web for software distribution. There's a lot of snake oil - like SwiftUI, React-Native, Flutter, that always gets people excited but rarely makes an appearance in world-class software.
A few years back I did an eval of cross-platform frameworks to target (in order) Windows, MacOS, Linux, maybe Android. This was around the time of peak complaining about Electron bloating out the installer for every crapplet to 35MB -- so I was prejudiced against Electron going in.
I came to the conclusion that they were all atrociously awful for both DX and UX except for Electron and JavaFX (maybe that's because I'm a Java fanatic.)
Comments
My argument is more that the filesystem is a very very very good abstraction to build on and the addition of a network layer exponentially increases complexity and as a result decreases quality.
You can certainly do it, and sometimes it works out just fine, but generalizing all popular software client/server architectures contribute to modern software woes in my opinion (not to mention it discourages privacy! your tailnet example being a good counter-example).
Cross-platform development is another can of worms, and a strong advantage of the web for software distribution. There's a lot of snake oil - like SwiftUI, React-Native, Flutter, that always gets people excited but rarely makes an appearance in world-class software.
A few years back I did an eval of cross-platform frameworks to target (in order) Windows, MacOS, Linux, maybe Android. This was around the time of peak complaining about Electron bloating out the installer for every crapplet to 35MB -- so I was prejudiced against Electron going in.
I came to the conclusion that they were all atrociously awful for both DX and UX except for Electron and JavaFX (maybe that's because I'm a Java fanatic.)