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Totally true. I didn't write this as a knock against node at all. I think there is a lot that is great there. I was just describing my experience trying to get

Totally true. I didn't write this as a knock against node at all. I think there is a lot that is great there. I was just describing my experience trying to get a project from an experienced, but opinionated in the sense that they had a set of tools they felt would work best for our project, freelancer up and running so that I could make a few changes to integrate it into our development process. I was just trying to give a counterpoint to the idea that node is somehow easier to get up and running than python. In fact, I would have a lot of the same opinions about getting a python project started as has been voiced in many of the comments here regarding node. I would say "Don't worry about things like conda, virtualenvwrapper, etc. You just need to create a new venv for each project, activate it, and use pip to install any packages you need" But I'll acknowledge that sometimes you need to do something a little outside the norm and it starts to make sense to rope in some other tools.

danShumway 8y ago
I think that when people like me say, "Node is easy to get up and running", we're coming at it from the perspective of, "well, you don't need to do any of this crazy stuff with Babel or Webpack." It's easy to forget that for the average newcomer just getting started with JS, there is an enormous pressure to start out with something like React+Redux with a special transpilation step that runs through some kind of Grunt config with a niche linter that the tutorial writer decided they were going to promote one day. So when I talk about Javascript being accessible, I'm talking about this perfect world where you don't have all these people constantly telling you that you're doing it wrong, and where you're coming at it from the perspective of, "a tool should just automate something that I already roughly know how to do and don't want to repeat over and over." I'm thinking about this almost fictional world of Javascript where you can clone a Github project and the ratio of config files to source code is relatively small. Again, it's not a criticism of anyone who feels overwhelmed or wants to acknowledge that it's a problem, because it is a problem. I just want to take every opportunity I can to point at it and say, "you don't have to do this, the insane setup is a cultural thing, not a tech thing". And that's not to put anyone down who uses those libraries or to make them feel like they're doing it wrong -- it's just to push in the opposite direction of that cultural pressure.

danShumway 8y ago

I think that when people like me say, "Node is easy to get up and running", we're coming at it from the perspective of, "well, you don't need to do any of this crazy stuff with Babel or Webpack." It's easy to forget that for the average newcomer just getting started with JS, there is an enormous pressure to start out with something like React+Redux with a special transpilation step that runs through some kind of Grunt config with a niche linter that the tutorial writer decided they were going to promote one day. So when I talk about Javascript being accessible, I'm talking about this perfect world where you don't have all these people constantly telling you that you're doing it wrong, and where you're coming at it from the perspective of, "a tool should just automate something that I already roughly know how to do and don't want to repeat over and over." I'm thinking about this almost fictional world of Javascript where you can clone a Github project and the ratio of config files to source code is relatively small. Again, it's not a criticism of anyone who feels overwhelmed or wants to acknowledge that it's a problem, because it is a problem. I just want to take every opportunity I can to point at it and say, "you don't have to do this, the insane setup is a cultural thing, not a tech thing". And that's not to put anyone down who uses those libraries or to make them feel like they're doing it wrong -- it's just to push in the opposite direction of that cultural pressure.