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When I worked in embedded systems and systems programming a decade ago, it was totally normal to spend over a day getting your computer set up after joining a n
by skrebbel 9y ago
When I worked in embedded systems and systems programming a decade ago, it was totally normal to spend over a day getting your computer set up after joining a new team.
Sounds exactly like what the author describes here, so what changed? What changed is that the browser became a popular application platform, forcing frontenders to deal with the stuff everybody else has been doing for decades.
I'm not saying this can't be improved, and there's a huge difference between projects in that respect. I know teams where getting up and running is a matter of installing node, yarn, and running a "yarn install" and It Just Works.
But the thing is, build tooling is hard and it always has been. This has little to do with web design, except that designers used to have the comfort to be able to ignore it. And that's harder with single-page web apps.
- pgorczak 9y agoNot sure if this is about comfort. Those complicated workflows and interfaces pretty much go against the principles of what designers are trying to achieve with their own work.
- mmargerum 9y agoHe’s exaggerating. You can download a cli tool that lets you create a react or vue web app with Babel, webpack, hot code loading, etc in one command. It just works. I know because I just did it and built a large app from it . I think I added 3 lines to my webpack config to proxy api calls to me real web server. It’s magical to code on the fly and I think people have a short memory or aren’t old enough to remember hand coding make files and waiting 20 minutes for your app to compile and link. Frameworks like vue.js are elegant as all hell and js has the lowest getting shit done to ceremony ratio of any language I’ve ever used. Sure there’s a few gotchas. Try using c++. Now there’s a minefield.