7 ms·

Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the industry and just speculate on trends?

by lsalvatore 7y ago

dplgk 7y ago
Well, it's not really targeted at actual developers.
- fastball 7y ago
  You need to know JS to use Gatsby, so... seems like development to me?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
- wp381640 7y ago
  > I wrote one once, and it was a couple hundred lines of code. This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain edit: rather than cheapshot with a throwaway comment i'll expand on this - from my experience what Gatsby provides is an open source pluggable info processing pipeline. I'm really interested in seeing it develop as a replacement for some of the larger and much more expensive and proprietary internal knowledge and content management systems which provide a ton of plugins to tap into resevoirs and allow you to process/publish internally
  - onion2k 7y ago
    I use Gatsby and I like it, but the alternative is a few hundred lines of code if you're doing what Gatsby says it does (eg a static site generator for markdown files). The fact Gatsby can do much more doesn't mean everyone who uses it is doing the other stuff. If you just want a static site Gatsby is overkill.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  I take issue with your tone and cynicism, and disagree w/ your premise. Your sarcasm and condescension aren't helpful. And there's no way your "couple hundred lines of code" addressed more than a fraction of the real-world use cases addressed by Gatsby. You cast aspersions on a huge swath of your peers who work with the best tools at hand to solve difficult problems... it's not just arrogant, it's ignorant. IME it's the ultimate poser/hipster move to denigrate modern web dev (your so-called "Cool Kid Stack"), while ignoring the ways in which the world has changed (and become more complicated and challenging) since you formed your ideas about simple HTML-generating scripts being sufficient to meet the requirements of a modern web application. The true "continuous source of churn and maintenance work" is the problem space -- endlessly diverse clients on radically heterogenous devices with highly variable network conditions, and end-user expectations that only ever ratchet in the direction of faster, more secure, more reliable, more polished experiences. I feel your pain about keeping up with tools that can empower teams to address these challenges; but to suggest that the stack is to blame, that the complexity is unnecessary and arises from self-interested outfits looking to build a moat? Nonsense. I write all this as a 21-year veteran of web development-related work, and in the spirit of respectful disagreement.
  - graphememes 7y ago
    Except a couple hundred lines of code could address the issues that Gatsby addresses. The posters here aren't wrong. It is an overhyped, overbloated, overconfig heavy stack that ultimately renders static html. I have used them, they are exactly as these posters say.
    - dunerat 7y ago
      do you have any suggestions for people like myself, who aren't interested in or are not capable of building their own proprietary static site generator? Any tools that meet similar needs to those that gatsby meets that you would recommend and why?
      - quickthrower2 7y ago
        Wordpress has plugins that can export the site as a static site.
- dang 7y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - networkimprov 7y ago
    It's a dismissal for sure, but the original comment doesn't read as shallow to me.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - geofft 7y ago
    The frustrating thing is, how, precisely, are you supposed to teach that every bit of complexity isn't necessary, the world hasn't changed, and a few-hundred-line solution works fine? This is an entirely serious question. I've got multiple few-hundred-line projects in development at work replacing internal tools - yes, they solve 90% of the use cases but the remaining 10% were generally either ill-advised or theoretical - and I don't know either how to get teams of developers not to build bloated messes or how to communicate that my smaller product shouldn't be taken less seriously for having fewer LOC.
    - dang 7y ago
      I totally agree that it's a legitimate concern. I share it. From an internet comment point of view, the first thing is to steer clear of, say, the top 5 "you suck" sorts of comment. Because if you fall into one of those, or get interpreted that way, then you're not teaching anybody anything, just putting someone down and encouraging worse from others. If you know more and have something to teach—and accidental software complexity is an extremely under-taught topic—the burden is on you to establish a context in which real communication is possible. How do you do that? I'm not sure; we could probably exchange notes on this for hours.
tomc1985 7y ago
Not OP but the mess that is node and its ecosystem is indeed overly-complicated
- emilsedgh 7y ago
  Care to elaborate? In what regard?
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    The other comment does a good job illustrating
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  It's hidden away behind layers of stuff for the most part, but, I agree (and this is coming from someone who works with Gatsby every day); I recently added Typescript support as well so now, with the handful of packages we have in our monorepo, it's becoming a convoluted mess of webpack, babel, typescript, and the tooling in between like gatsby and storybook, which do configuration sliiightly different. Honestly I got so frustrated with dealing with dependency hell the other day that I only half-jokingly said I was going to go back to writing vanilla ES5, whichever the last version that still works on IE is. It's just too much of an obscure headache, too much tooling and intermediary steps. I can't get our error reporting tool to work properly because the source maps are a confusing jumble either. Mind you this is aimed at the JS ecosystem in its current state; Gatsby itself has been great.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    I've been writing my side project in vanilla es5. I use rollup for bundling, and nothing else. Life is great.
k__ 7y ago
At least in the React eco-system I got the feeling that Gatsby does mostly it's own thing. You can setup a Next.js system with mostly regular React skills.

Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the industry and just speculate on trends?

dplgk 7y ago

Well, it's not really targeted at actual developers.

fastball 7y ago
You need to know JS to use Gatsby, so... seems like development to me?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

wp381640 7y ago
> I wrote one once, and it was a couple hundred lines of code. This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain edit: rather than cheapshot with a throwaway comment i'll expand on this - from my experience what Gatsby provides is an open source pluggable info processing pipeline. I'm really interested in seeing it develop as a replacement for some of the larger and much more expensive and proprietary internal knowledge and content management systems which provide a ton of plugins to tap into resevoirs and allow you to process/publish internally
- onion2k 7y ago
  I use Gatsby and I like it, but the alternative is a few hundred lines of code if you're doing what Gatsby says it does (eg a static site generator for markdown files). The fact Gatsby can do much more doesn't mean everyone who uses it is doing the other stuff. If you just want a static site Gatsby is overkill.
chrisweekly 7y ago
I take issue with your tone and cynicism, and disagree w/ your premise. Your sarcasm and condescension aren't helpful. And there's no way your "couple hundred lines of code" addressed more than a fraction of the real-world use cases addressed by Gatsby. You cast aspersions on a huge swath of your peers who work with the best tools at hand to solve difficult problems... it's not just arrogant, it's ignorant. IME it's the ultimate poser/hipster move to denigrate modern web dev (your so-called "Cool Kid Stack"), while ignoring the ways in which the world has changed (and become more complicated and challenging) since you formed your ideas about simple HTML-generating scripts being sufficient to meet the requirements of a modern web application. The true "continuous source of churn and maintenance work" is the problem space -- endlessly diverse clients on radically heterogenous devices with highly variable network conditions, and end-user expectations that only ever ratchet in the direction of faster, more secure, more reliable, more polished experiences. I feel your pain about keeping up with tools that can empower teams to address these challenges; but to suggest that the stack is to blame, that the complexity is unnecessary and arises from self-interested outfits looking to build a moat? Nonsense. I write all this as a 21-year veteran of web development-related work, and in the spirit of respectful disagreement.
- graphememes 7y ago
  Except a couple hundred lines of code could address the issues that Gatsby addresses. The posters here aren't wrong. It is an overhyped, overbloated, overconfig heavy stack that ultimately renders static html. I have used them, they are exactly as these posters say.
  - dunerat 7y ago
    do you have any suggestions for people like myself, who aren't interested in or are not capable of building their own proprietary static site generator? Any tools that meet similar needs to those that gatsby meets that you would recommend and why?
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      Wordpress has plugins that can export the site as a static site.
dang 7y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- networkimprov 7y ago
  It's a dismissal for sure, but the original comment doesn't read as shallow to me.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- geofft 7y ago
  The frustrating thing is, how, precisely, are you supposed to teach that every bit of complexity isn't necessary, the world hasn't changed, and a few-hundred-line solution works fine? This is an entirely serious question. I've got multiple few-hundred-line projects in development at work replacing internal tools - yes, they solve 90% of the use cases but the remaining 10% were generally either ill-advised or theoretical - and I don't know either how to get teams of developers not to build bloated messes or how to communicate that my smaller product shouldn't be taken less seriously for having fewer LOC.
  - dang 7y ago
    I totally agree that it's a legitimate concern. I share it. From an internet comment point of view, the first thing is to steer clear of, say, the top 5 "you suck" sorts of comment. Because if you fall into one of those, or get interpreted that way, then you're not teaching anybody anything, just putting someone down and encouraging worse from others. If you know more and have something to teach—and accidental software complexity is an extremely under-taught topic—the burden is on you to establish a context in which real communication is possible. How do you do that? I'm not sure; we could probably exchange notes on this for hours.

tomc1985 7y ago

Not OP but the mess that is node and its ecosystem is indeed overly-complicated

emilsedgh 7y ago
Care to elaborate? In what regard?
- tomc1985 7y ago
  The other comment does a good job illustrating
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
It's hidden away behind layers of stuff for the most part, but, I agree (and this is coming from someone who works with Gatsby every day); I recently added Typescript support as well so now, with the handful of packages we have in our monorepo, it's becoming a convoluted mess of webpack, babel, typescript, and the tooling in between like gatsby and storybook, which do configuration sliiightly different. Honestly I got so frustrated with dealing with dependency hell the other day that I only half-jokingly said I was going to go back to writing vanilla ES5, whichever the last version that still works on IE is. It's just too much of an obscure headache, too much tooling and intermediary steps. I can't get our error reporting tool to work properly because the source maps are a confusing jumble either. Mind you this is aimed at the JS ecosystem in its current state; Gatsby itself has been great.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  I've been writing my side project in vanilla es5. I use rollup for bundling, and nothing else. Life is great.

k__ 7y ago

At least in the React eco-system I got the feeling that Gatsby does mostly it's own thing. You can setup a Next.js system with mostly regular React skills.