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haha you're quite behind my friend, nowadays it's all about "Yarn", even npm is outdated. I'm starting to see more and more open source projects using yarn inst

haha you're quite behind my friend, nowadays it's all about "Yarn", even npm is outdated. I'm starting to see more and more open source projects using yarn instead of npm. Cynicism aside, I am with you on this, it's becoming too damn annoying to build anything simple. No matter what people used to say I used to like Javascript because of its simplicity. Now it's become the next Java, I'm sure that's part good thing but also part bad, and some new, much simpler language will come along sooner or later to replace what a lot of people are using JS for. The reason you need to use browserify and its friends nowadays is people started shoving in too much code to frontend, and all the logic is on the frontend nowadays. Basically you need to do an equivalent of backend programming on the frontend side and it's become too complex not to use dependency manager. Like I said I fucking hate this movement too and I think something much simpler will come along to replace much of what people use JS for, especially for simple cases. Also I think this change will happen once the pendulum swings and things move back to backend again (this pendulum swinging happens ALWAYS with technology so I'm sure it will happen someday in unforseeable future)

nevi-me 10y ago
I tried Yarn a few months ago, wasted half an hour because of some silly issues, though I think there was a problem with NPM on that day. I threw it away after that. At least Java has Kotlin, it's made Java pleasant for me again. I get the logic of the browserify movement, after all we've been punting Node.js as the grail of shared code. The irritating thing is that a lot of what's out there is opinionated, you read 3 tutorials/guides and everyone does something differently. I follow nodejs/node on Github, and the amount of comments over the past year or 2 for and against modules is what kept me standing on the fence for very long. I struggled just to get Mongoose working properly with TS a few weeks ago, the thought of having to waste a few days converting everything to a Class before I can export my functions properly turned me off. Now I just ignore the TS warnings because I know my code works.
BjoernKW 10y ago
I don't think we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. JavaScript is perfectly adequate. Like you said it's just how it's used which makes front-end development exceedingly complex. So, our approaches and techniques need to change not necessarily the language itself. I agree that the pendulum will swing back to the back-end again. The question is how we can achieve that without foregoing many of the useful patterns and the interactivity that came along with approaches like SPAs and frameworks like Angular and React. The approach Rails took with Turbolinks seems viable in some ways. It's lacking in terms of reactiveness / interactivity though. Turbolinks is great for SPA-like switching between views but not really useful for making that views more reactive. I'm not sure how exactly a technique would have to look like that allows you to have React-like reactiveness but still have all the logic in the back-end. Maybe that's an avenue worth exploring. Another one might be how the same problem was solved with Swing and similar UI frameworks for other languages.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  I agree with you to certain degree, but this was not the only thing I was talking about. I dislike what has happened to Javascript the language itself. The way they changed makes the language almost unrecognizable. I think JS the language used to be simple and elegant (even though a lot of people would say otherwise). But they've added on these new features that introduce a lot of complexity. Sure these features make Javascript more "powerful", but at a cost of making it way too complex. And these new features don't do anything that wasn't possible before. The new JS is more different from the old JS than how C++ was different from C. Normally when something like this happens to other languages, they say they've "forked" it and come up with a new name. I was perfectly fine with the old approach of creating classes from functions and that was what really attracted me to javascript once I got used to it since it's a very unique concept that showed you how you can create complexity from simplicity. And I'm sure soon with the official support of the new js, the ecosystem will become even more complex and chaotic. And then people will realize it's not worth it to build or learn yet another javascript framework, and stop. Then there will be few winners left in the arena, and innovation will stop. No more "javascript fatigue" so I guess that would be good, but that's when I think another simple language will take over. Besides, js will probably NOT be the primary language of devices of the future, so people will probably move on.

nevi-me 10y ago

I tried Yarn a few months ago, wasted half an hour because of some silly issues, though I think there was a problem with NPM on that day. I threw it away after that. At least Java has Kotlin, it's made Java pleasant for me again. I get the logic of the browserify movement, after all we've been punting Node.js as the grail of shared code. The irritating thing is that a lot of what's out there is opinionated, you read 3 tutorials/guides and everyone does something differently. I follow nodejs/node on Github, and the amount of comments over the past year or 2 for and against modules is what kept me standing on the fence for very long. I struggled just to get Mongoose working properly with TS a few weeks ago, the thought of having to waste a few days converting everything to a Class before I can export my functions properly turned me off. Now I just ignore the TS warnings because I know my code works.

BjoernKW 10y ago

I don't think we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. JavaScript is perfectly adequate. Like you said it's just how it's used which makes front-end development exceedingly complex. So, our approaches and techniques need to change not necessarily the language itself. I agree that the pendulum will swing back to the back-end again. The question is how we can achieve that without foregoing many of the useful patterns and the interactivity that came along with approaches like SPAs and frameworks like Angular and React. The approach Rails took with Turbolinks seems viable in some ways. It's lacking in terms of reactiveness / interactivity though. Turbolinks is great for SPA-like switching between views but not really useful for making that views more reactive. I'm not sure how exactly a technique would have to look like that allows you to have React-like reactiveness but still have all the logic in the back-end. Maybe that's an avenue worth exploring. Another one might be how the same problem was solved with Swing and similar UI frameworks for other languages.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
I agree with you to certain degree, but this was not the only thing I was talking about. I dislike what has happened to Javascript the language itself. The way they changed makes the language almost unrecognizable. I think JS the language used to be simple and elegant (even though a lot of people would say otherwise). But they've added on these new features that introduce a lot of complexity. Sure these features make Javascript more "powerful", but at a cost of making it way too complex. And these new features don't do anything that wasn't possible before. The new JS is more different from the old JS than how C++ was different from C. Normally when something like this happens to other languages, they say they've "forked" it and come up with a new name. I was perfectly fine with the old approach of creating classes from functions and that was what really attracted me to javascript once I got used to it since it's a very unique concept that showed you how you can create complexity from simplicity. And I'm sure soon with the official support of the new js, the ecosystem will become even more complex and chaotic. And then people will realize it's not worth it to build or learn yet another javascript framework, and stop. Then there will be few winners left in the arena, and innovation will stop. No more "javascript fatigue" so I guess that would be good, but that's when I think another simple language will take over. Besides, js will probably NOT be the primary language of devices of the future, so people will probably move on.