5 ms·

Practice sounds like exactly what OP is trying to avoid. Also, you're talking about small apps. And also, webpack is the most incomprehensible waste of time tha

Practice sounds like exactly what OP is trying to avoid. Also, you're talking about small apps. And also, webpack is the most incomprehensible waste of time that I've ever encountered in development. No hyperbole.

tracker1 10y ago
My point was that if you're keeping up on your tooling knowledge, it isn't so hard to bang out something quick/small. If you aren't doing it as often, then the difference is smaller in terms of impact to use newer tooling. Regarding webpack, there aren't wholly better options yet... I'm sure there will be, but for now, it's pretty nice.
- ehnto 10y ago
  I have been doing front end for a good 8 years now, and I stopped finding benefit in most of the newer tools since Gulp and SASS, with the exception recently of RiotJS. I am not against people trying to push front end technology forward, but it feels like we're just inventing a thousand different wheels when the first wheel wasn't really lacking much so long as you knew how to use it. I am wary of any new JS library as if the past many years are anything to go by, it's practically technical debt the moment it hits v1, if it ever does.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I think the benefit of using webpack/browserify for bundling modules and writing modular code is pretty compelling...
    - ehnto 10y ago
      It is, but it is a lot of tooling and knowledge overhead for a problem that can often be solved using whatever backend framework you're using. Or even no framework at all. Laravel for example, it is very easy to only include JS files you need on a given page and make them modular using even vanilla JS. You can even concat and minify it all, and it's all cacheable and idiomatic to the framework. I guess the main issue is if I am spending more time on tooling and configuration of all the different parts of a build process then I lose the efficiency gains. For something like webpack there are no efficiency gains to begin with, as you can write modular JS without it. It definitely has it's place and I am sure if I were exclusively a frontend dev I might find it more compelling. But I can achieve clean, modular and reusable JS without it so it's one less tool I need to worry about.
kyriakos 10y ago
Thank you. I thought it was just me finding webpack confusing.

tracker1 10y ago

My point was that if you're keeping up on your tooling knowledge, it isn't so hard to bang out something quick/small. If you aren't doing it as often, then the difference is smaller in terms of impact to use newer tooling. Regarding webpack, there aren't wholly better options yet... I'm sure there will be, but for now, it's pretty nice.

ehnto 10y ago
I have been doing front end for a good 8 years now, and I stopped finding benefit in most of the newer tools since Gulp and SASS, with the exception recently of RiotJS. I am not against people trying to push front end technology forward, but it feels like we're just inventing a thousand different wheels when the first wheel wasn't really lacking much so long as you knew how to use it. I am wary of any new JS library as if the past many years are anything to go by, it's practically technical debt the moment it hits v1, if it ever does.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I think the benefit of using webpack/browserify for bundling modules and writing modular code is pretty compelling...
  - ehnto 10y ago
    It is, but it is a lot of tooling and knowledge overhead for a problem that can often be solved using whatever backend framework you're using. Or even no framework at all. Laravel for example, it is very easy to only include JS files you need on a given page and make them modular using even vanilla JS. You can even concat and minify it all, and it's all cacheable and idiomatic to the framework. I guess the main issue is if I am spending more time on tooling and configuration of all the different parts of a build process then I lose the efficiency gains. For something like webpack there are no efficiency gains to begin with, as you can write modular JS without it. It definitely has it's place and I am sure if I were exclusively a frontend dev I might find it more compelling. But I can achieve clean, modular and reusable JS without it so it's one less tool I need to worry about.

kyriakos 10y ago

Thank you. I thought it was just me finding webpack confusing.