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This seems to be something of a trend in the software library and tool world: A problem emerges. Some early, sharp thinkers create tools which attack the probl

This seems to be something of a trend in the software library and tool world: A problem emerges. Some early, sharp thinkers create tools which attack the problem in a high level, abstract, powerful way... but also with the rough edges that come with being early. These tools get a few adopters, but not that many because it is difficult to see the value versus the obvious rough edges. Then other sharp thinkers, put off by those rough edges, create N new waves of tools which attack the problem less effectively, but more accessibly. Then eventually, some years later, common practice of the waves of tools will circle back around and start doing the things that that early rave started. It's easy to criticize the "daily new JavaScript framework" phenomenon along these lines, but I don't think it is specific to JavaScript, nor specific to 2017, and not even specific to software development. It's just part of how we humans work.

pzs 9y ago
Reading your comment reminded me of a classic piece [1] about a similar phenomenon. [1] http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431.12 http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431....
nostrademons 9y ago
Somewhat relatedly - when a new technology wave gets started, it's usually proprietary, because there are big competitive advantages that can be had by being the only one with possession of a new technology. As details leak out and enterprising independent hackers get interested, commodity or open-source clones emerge, and they get much wider distribution simply because they're cheap or free. The original innovator is caught flat-footed, loses mindshare, and eventually has to adopt the open-source solution when it becomes dominant in the open-source world. Altair -> Apple -> IBM -> Dell & clones. UNIX -> System V -> BSD -> Linux. MapReduce -> Hadoop. GMail -> Closure Compiler -> Traceur -> Babel. Google datacenters -> AWS -> Docker -> Kubernetes.
- bsimpson 9y ago
  This is a very strange example. Gmail, Closure, and Traceur are all Google products.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    And Closure and Traceur are both open source.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      And Babel's the one people actually use. Within the progression, each new generation is decreasingly tied to a proprietary, revenue-generating product, and increasingly intended for outside consumption. So GMail was completely proprietary and closed off from the outside world. The JS library, compiler, and optimizer from GMail was spun off into Closure, which was widely used across Google products and finally open-sourced 5ish years later, but never got widespread external use because it's very tightly tied to the style of JS development within Google. The idea of JS transpilation was proven by Closure, and Traceur was developed from the outset to be open-sourced and not tied to Google products - but it was developed by a member of the Chrome team, and so the developer perspective was that of how internal Google engineers think, and the development process wasn't really inclusive of outside engineers. Finally, Babel was developed entirely outside Google, based on ideas that had been proven out and were widely disseminated, but it was developed from the start with an open community process.
debaserab2 9y ago
I think some of this might be that selection bias. Closure compiler is popular, plenty of not-so-sexy projects have used it since its inception to a great degree of success. I seem to see it with some consistency in the enterprise world. It's never been popular with the HN / startup crowd.
ccdev 9y ago
As someone who had some amateur experience with C++ roughly 10 years ago I felt it was sort of deja vu with JavaScript. Transpilers, aggressive optimization, automation scripts it's nothing that was too unfamiliar with me. Webpack is roughly a library linker. Babel is like GCC Make. Gruntfile ~= makefile. I think it's coming of age but the JS ecosystem is still undergoing growing pains, plus it can be overwhelming to newbies. People are paralyzed by too much choice. Having IDEs like Webstorm would be good at least taming or organizing workflow better.
- posterboy 9y ago
  Babel is more like cfront, transpiling from a superset to an older base set of language features. Edit: Maybe you meant to compare it to Macro Pre-Processing, which is often set in makefiles. But it's a shim loader.

pzs 9y ago

Reading your comment reminded me of a classic piece [1] about a similar phenomenon. [1] http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431.12 http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431....

nostrademons 9y ago

Somewhat relatedly - when a new technology wave gets started, it's usually proprietary, because there are big competitive advantages that can be had by being the only one with possession of a new technology. As details leak out and enterprising independent hackers get interested, commodity or open-source clones emerge, and they get much wider distribution simply because they're cheap or free. The original innovator is caught flat-footed, loses mindshare, and eventually has to adopt the open-source solution when it becomes dominant in the open-source world. Altair -> Apple -> IBM -> Dell & clones. UNIX -> System V -> BSD -> Linux. MapReduce -> Hadoop. GMail -> Closure Compiler -> Traceur -> Babel. Google datacenters -> AWS -> Docker -> Kubernetes.

bsimpson 9y ago
This is a very strange example. Gmail, Closure, and Traceur are all Google products.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  And Closure and Traceur are both open source.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    And Babel's the one people actually use. Within the progression, each new generation is decreasingly tied to a proprietary, revenue-generating product, and increasingly intended for outside consumption. So GMail was completely proprietary and closed off from the outside world. The JS library, compiler, and optimizer from GMail was spun off into Closure, which was widely used across Google products and finally open-sourced 5ish years later, but never got widespread external use because it's very tightly tied to the style of JS development within Google. The idea of JS transpilation was proven by Closure, and Traceur was developed from the outset to be open-sourced and not tied to Google products - but it was developed by a member of the Chrome team, and so the developer perspective was that of how internal Google engineers think, and the development process wasn't really inclusive of outside engineers. Finally, Babel was developed entirely outside Google, based on ideas that had been proven out and were widely disseminated, but it was developed from the start with an open community process.

debaserab2 9y ago

I think some of this might be that selection bias. Closure compiler is popular, plenty of not-so-sexy projects have used it since its inception to a great degree of success. I seem to see it with some consistency in the enterprise world. It's never been popular with the HN / startup crowd.

ccdev 9y ago

As someone who had some amateur experience with C++ roughly 10 years ago I felt it was sort of deja vu with JavaScript. Transpilers, aggressive optimization, automation scripts it's nothing that was too unfamiliar with me. Webpack is roughly a library linker. Babel is like GCC Make. Gruntfile ~= makefile. I think it's coming of age but the JS ecosystem is still undergoing growing pains, plus it can be overwhelming to newbies. People are paralyzed by too much choice. Having IDEs like Webstorm would be good at least taming or organizing workflow better.

posterboy 9y ago
Babel is more like cfront, transpiling from a superset to an older base set of language features. Edit: Maybe you meant to compare it to Macro Pre-Processing, which is often set in makefiles. But it's a shim loader.