WebPack is not the only way (opens in new tab)

(medium.com)

3 pointsvmware5059y ago3 comments

3 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

douche9y ago· 2 in thread

"Modern" front-end dev is so needlessly complex and byzantine. I don't know whether the tooling is just inadequate, or people are committed to making things harder than it needs to be for some reason, but I'd almost rather write MSBuild project files by hand than deal with this mountain of build runners, dependency managers, plugins and configuration scripts over in Javascript land.

brudgers9y ago

The problem comes from the same place as its success. JavaScript evolved based on the assumption that the browser JavaScript API was the only API that mattered. The single namespace model made it easy to write code because treating the browser API as first class made JavaScript a 'big' language where every procedure a programmer might want was directly callable.

I like C# and all, but when I write JavaScript I don't have figure out if I need to type `using Document.Query;` or just `using Document;` or `using Document.Query.HTML;` I can just type `document.getElementsByTagName('a')` and do what I want to do with the result.

The absence of ceremony makes getting simple things done much easier. It does not make hard things easier. And that's the problem JavaScript is dealing with...people are increasingly trying to do harder things in a big language that is not designed to be extended easily.

On the other hand, these things take time. It took about twenty years for the Lisp community to move toward Common Lisp and another decade before the community had mostly converged. And that was with a language where hard problems such as development tool development are in the sweet spot.

acemarke9y ago

Exactly. I recently put together a presentation that gives an overview of modern web development [0], and two of the slides address this issue in particular:

Javascript/Client Challenges

- No built-in module definition system

- No encapsulation

- Prototypal-based inheritance system unlike most languages

- No static type declarations or compilation

- Dynamically modified objects and data

- Minimal standard library

- Variations in browser capabilities

- Document layout model repurposed for application layouts

Javascript/Client Dev Goals

- Minimize bytes sent over the wire

- Handle browser compatibility issues

- Fill in gaps in JS standard library and language spec

- Reuse and share code between apps

- Build increasingly complex full-blown applications that just happen to live inside a browser

[0] http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/10/presentation-modern...

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