3 ms·

No, just no. Web debugging is worse than anything I've ever seen - maybe a bit better than cmd-line debugging with gdb, but not much. Sourcemaps supposedly wor

No, just no. Web debugging is worse than anything I've ever seen - maybe a bit better than cmd-line debugging with gdb, but not much. Sourcemaps supposedly work, though I have never seen this actually work in practice. And since babel is apparently indispensible, you can't be entirely sure that conditionals and statements in your source haven't been optimized away in the transpilation. Routinely one sets breakpoints in JS files that are not hit by Chrome dev tools, and symbols that should be in scope don't want to be defined. It's a mess. I suppose if you know how to structure the rube goldberg machine correctly, web dev can be productive. But it's so hard, and the hardness is of the tedious yak-shaving variety. I just hate it and want to fire up Visual Studio and write some .NET apps with tools that just work instead.

Waterluvian 8y ago
"Rube Goldberg" is the best description I've heard for a JS dev stack. So true. Its so awful. But its so much better than it used to be and I pray it continues to improve. I hear what you're saying. They can be really finicky. I've had very good luck using it all cleanly without issue. I especially love binding vscode to an open browser so that I use vscode for all the inspection, breakpoints, etc. But I also experienced your lamentations. It took a long time for me to get it all working. Sourcemaps were so unreliable years ago. Now they just seem to work, having learned all the painful lessons about configuration. There still aren't any sane defaults and the ground won't stop shifting. But now that I have it working, it works great.