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When I worked at a web agency as a dedicated front-end developer, the projects would use any language from .NET, PHP, Ruby, etc. I don't want to depend on the b

When I worked at a web agency as a dedicated front-end developer, the projects would use any language from .NET, PHP, Ruby, etc. I don't want to depend on the back-end of the project in my front-end stack. All of my work in the front-end ecosystem is made using JS+CSS. Why would I want to install Go or Ruby to build those? Running JS to manage my JS and CSS makes more sense... One big bonus being that I can actually lift the hood and tweak my build system because it uses the same language as the one it will be parsing.

Klathmon 8y ago
You just reminded me of a really good point. We already have "previous examples" of people trying to make CSS tooling in another language! sass was written in ruby originally, and it sucked so much to manage and work with for many devs that they literally re-wrote the ENTIRE thing in Dart so they could gain the benefits of the JS ecosystem (like npm)! It isn't a compiled language, but it is an example of someone having done this at least once, and ending up regretting it to the point that they spent multiple years rewriting it in a language that compiles to JS and deprecated the ruby version.
- Raphmedia 8y ago
  Indeed, requiring Ruby to build SCSS files used to be a pain. Every other part of our toolchain was done via NPM. You could install all of it in seconds via one command... and then people had to hunt the correct and compatible Ruby binaries for their system. Our .NET developers on Windows hated this. "Why do I need to install Ruby to build your front-end?!" Dart Sass was a godsend.