I see a poll on similar lines "You and mobile development" asked two years back[1]. This would be an interesting exercise, given the rise and fall of platforms since.<p>[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3014502
'Web' is a bit ambiguous here. It could plausibly mean either writing http services predominantly used by native apps or client-side browser development, which are really quite different.<p>The original question was better, I think, because it was clearly restricted to which <i>client</i> platform people are targeting.<p>I'm surprised that the ratios within purely client mobile platforms haven't really changed that much, apart from a few new marginal entrants. Given what I've seen from freelance offers and job ads, I'd have expected the iOS-Android ratio to have shifted further in favour Android than it has compared to two years ago, when it was basically all iOS.
Bar graph so far:<p><a href="http://quickhist.onloop.net/Android=57,BlackBerry=3,Chrome%20Store=12,Firefox%20Marketplace=9,iOS=61,Linux=108,OSX=40,Steam=4,Web=211,Windows=58,Windows%20Phone=9,Windows%20Store=6,Other=12,Embedded%20or%20RTOS=4/Which%20platform%20do%20you%20develop%20for%3F%20:%20HN%20Poll,%20Oct%2024%20%2713" rel="nofollow">http://quickhist.onloop.net/Android=57,BlackBerry=3,Chrome%2...</a>
I was thinking about how popular Go is and looking at example code which to me is fairly clean. Anyway Go seems popular and looks cool and I think that is the next thing I am going to learn.<p>But the point is, what I am doing with Web applications for the most part is making rich UIs. So I was thinking, since Go compiles so fast, why not just download Go source and escape the browser, and get faster execution etc.? I mean I still think ToffeeScript is the best thing ever but Go is not bad at all.<p>So what I was thinking of making would be some kind of P2P-based DHT thing, totally decentralized of course, using UDP, and you can use it to distribute whatever, but two main things would be something like a web site but it would just be markdown and a tarball with Go code. Then you would display the markdown (maybe let them embed svg) and a button "Run Application" and sandbox the Go code with something like this <a href="https://github.com/zond/gosafe" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zond/gosafe</a>. Maybe have a way to tag sites or some kind of data-oriented alternative to domains. Point being we are using the web to make it convenient to distribute and access sandboxed applications (even the front ends for e-commerce stuff are becoming thick clients in a lot of cases).<p>It would be nice if we could break out of the browser and also weren't subject to the limitations of JavaScript. And I wouldn't miss HTML or CSS at all to tell the truth. And the other part of this is that the whole server-based model we have needs to go and be replaced with data-oriented networking.
It would be interesting to see how RWD replaces native applications on mobile platforms. This is something what we do at <a href="http://codedose.com" rel="nofollow">http://codedose.com</a> to make our corporate intranet web applications accessible from smaller factor devices without charging clients for native app development.
Only a minority (< 10%) of web developers develop for Chrome Store/Firefox Marketplace. Why would that be? As far as I can think, the advantages of putting on these stores are clear and there isn't much friction to adapt the app for them. Am I missing something?
Results of this poll as a bar chart in real-time(almost): <a href="http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=6603807" rel="nofollow">http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=6603807</a>
it interesting to see which subset of developers are most common at hacker news.<p>its not really surprising considering the content and philosophy that Linux and Web are rating so highly - but its nice to see anyway. :)