5 ms·

> Javascript has such a minimal standard library, you will need to get one or three third-party libraries to augment its core Maybe 5-10 years ago, there is no

by dntrkv 5y ago

> Javascript has such a minimal standard library, you will need to get one or three third-party libraries to augment its core Maybe 5-10 years ago, there is no need anymore > React is an excellent view library and nothing more. You will need to get one or three third-party system to turn it into a fully fledged web framework. Depends on your needs. Small app? React on its own is enough. Larger app? Add a router. That’s basically it. If you want a centralized state store, you can pick one of those up. It’s really not that difficult. > Frameworks like Next.js are good enough to create a static page, but as requirements grow more complex, its limited feature-set and lack of in-depth documentation will feel like a prison I don’t find any of this to be true. > Dev tooling is non existent, so it's on you to get and _configure_ a linter, type checker, testing framework, bundler, etc You mean there is nothing built in to the language itself? Yeah, that’s a feature in this case. We wouldn’t have the amazing 3rd party tooling if it did. The JS tooling ecosystem is amazing and getting things setup nowadays just takes one command.

franga2000 5y ago
I'll pick just one point to address: > The JS tooling ecosystem is amazing and getting things setup nowadays just takes one command. Which command would that be? Sure it's one command if you use one of a billion template projects, but just picking one of those is a chore and I'd never call that situation "amazing".
- thrower123 5y ago
  And god help you if you want to get anything to work just a little bit differently from how the "one command" chooses to set things up. Like, create-react-app is great, but if you have to eject, you've got no parachute
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dntrkv 5y ago
  Nowadays the only choice you’re really making is which styling library to use and which state management. Everything else is a given. Anyways, if you know enough about FE to have an opinion on the tooling, great, choose what you want. If you don’t wanna choose, use Next.js or CRA with React/Styled-Components and then add React Router if you need routing and add state management if you need it. These aren’t difficult choices to make. I have a feeling that the problem is that people are trying to make decisions they don’t need to be making up front. Evaluate the choices when you reach a situation that requires it.
  - neves 5y ago
    > Everything else is a given. Would you please send a link that summarizes this "everything else"? Every time I take a look at JS ecosystem I get lost.
    - dntrkv 5y ago
      React, Webpack, Eslint, Jest, React Testing Library That’s the standard setup nowadays and it’s what most people should go with. If you want type checking, add TS to the mix. But seriously, just use Next.js you can build tiny static sites with it and you can build complex SPAs. It’s very lightweight and basically just strings together all these tools while adding some convention that you can follow if you wish.
- chefandy 5y ago
  I don’t understand this sort of criticism. First, these generators are incredibly flexible. You can easily construct one command that fits your requirements. Understanding the correct options, your requirements for every part of the tool chain, and their occasionally predictable down-the-road implications takes quite some time, admittedly. However, all professional tools require knowledge and doc reading and experience with the latest bleeding-edge tools and experimentation and luck, I assume. Once you get a few years of experience under your belt working with this tool chain (not skipping the 3-4 hours per day after work to keep up with the latest JS ecosystem updates for this and the other new stacks you’ll need to learn throughout the week) you’ll be able to craft a command that requires very little reading or luck to use, and it could work, unmodified, for days, if not a week. If it turns out to not actually do what you want, you probably want the wrong thing— just ask on SO. But one-and-done, friend. Set it and forget it. Second, this is all really easy if you just take the time to understand the tool chain. It’s just 4 or 19ish crucial, interdependent parts that all really should be in place from the very beginning and only most of them have inscrutable configuration schemas. Some are even documented! If you need more handholding than that, Sally, countless domain experts in countless online fora eagerly offer guidance like “go learn how X works first” or “lol that guide is weeks out of date— you have to use knippull.js instead of GROUNCE because GROUNCE was taken over by FlammBae last week and they’re just trying to sell add-ons for their data store and have ignored all PRs to support the latest version of SLAPPD which flibBleJs uses to transmogrify bNumbn{e}rs templates which you need for tr1xBits.js to work.” Once you understand how that all works, and understand how the generators implement those things, know how to compensate for the NBCF delta (Non-Backwards-Compatible Feature delta which calculates the number of implementation changes between typing the first character of your command and hitting enter,) theoretically your one-and-done is undeniably achievable. Finally, people overstate the complexity of fixing a project started with the wrong boilerplate. Just experiment a bit. Spend a few days trying all the options to see which welcome pages don’t look broken in your browser (unless, of course, you’re using Waggle with FlermBox) and then narrow it down a bit based on that, and then just pick one. You can always fix it if it’s wrong. A literal child could understand the concept of “delete your project and start fresh” so I don’t think it should be hard to explain the concept to experienced software developers. Developers used to paralyzingly straightforward legacy logic and organizational paradigms love to say that JS web dev tooling has the logical structure of a Wallace and Gromit short. They're completely ignoring the fact that this process was not designed— it evolved, and that’s okay. Not great, but okay. Ultimately, it might look a little weird and insane and fragile if you peel back the onion skin to see how the sausage gets its secret sauce— but you too can achieve the pinnacle of modern developer push-button convenience with JS.
simion314 5y ago
>Maybe 5-10 years ago, there is no need anymore Is still either create your own or install a random package that brings other 20 as dependencies. Example, you want to show an Alert or Yes/No popup, This are built-in everywhere but n Web world you need to review and install a third party thing, or create your own buggy or incomplete implementation. Maybe you want modal dialogs, this is a standard in GUI tookits but you need to create your own or install a package/module/plugin specific for your project shitty framework Maybe your designer demands a (context) menu one with keyboard shortucts and native looking like , or a scrollbar that matches the website/app theme colors or that works horizontally without holding Shift like in native apps, you have again to find 1 solution from a giant pile of shitty packages. The dropdows,scrollbars, number spinner, color picker inputs CSS customization is pathetic, the designers demand customization and the only solution is installing third party stuff. There is no DataGrid or ListView component with a smart implementation that can hold many items so all websites implement a crappy inefficient thing, or show you only 20 items and you need to hit NExt Page like a money or again you find a third party solution. As a language JS progressed a lot, so much I am not sure if switching to TS is a good idea or I just need to wait until JS will catch up with TS. But as a platform the Web /DOM is still garbage, CSS got some nice feature with flexbox but that is all. People that did not wrote complex desktop apps with a GUI framework will not understand this, and think that the shitty component they create by nesting 12 divs and catching 2 events is the exact same thing. It is not, this GUI frameworks components are efficient and handle all events/cases properly. Even Google devs were incapable to make the Youtube search suggestion dropdown work correctly, many times it gets stuck open and you can't close it without a reload.
- Gare 5y ago
  > As a language JS progressed a lot, so much I am not sure if switching to TS is a good idea or I just need to wait until JS will catch up with TS. Can you elaborate on this? TS is just adding type checking to JS, the only runtime addition are enums. I doubt that JS will incorporate type checking anytime soon. I mostly agree with your other points.
  - simion314 5y ago

by dntrkv 5y ago

franga2000 5y ago

I'll pick just one point to address: > The JS tooling ecosystem is amazing and getting things setup nowadays just takes one command. Which command would that be? Sure it's one command if you use one of a billion template projects, but just picking one of those is a chore and I'd never call that situation "amazing".

thrower123 5y ago
And god help you if you want to get anything to work just a little bit differently from how the "one command" chooses to set things up. Like, create-react-app is great, but if you have to eject, you've got no parachute
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dntrkv 5y ago
Nowadays the only choice you’re really making is which styling library to use and which state management. Everything else is a given. Anyways, if you know enough about FE to have an opinion on the tooling, great, choose what you want. If you don’t wanna choose, use Next.js or CRA with React/Styled-Components and then add React Router if you need routing and add state management if you need it. These aren’t difficult choices to make. I have a feeling that the problem is that people are trying to make decisions they don’t need to be making up front. Evaluate the choices when you reach a situation that requires it.
- neves 5y ago
  > Everything else is a given. Would you please send a link that summarizes this "everything else"? Every time I take a look at JS ecosystem I get lost.
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    React, Webpack, Eslint, Jest, React Testing Library That’s the standard setup nowadays and it’s what most people should go with. If you want type checking, add TS to the mix. But seriously, just use Next.js you can build tiny static sites with it and you can build complex SPAs. It’s very lightweight and basically just strings together all these tools while adding some convention that you can follow if you wish.
chefandy 5y ago
I don’t understand this sort of criticism. First, these generators are incredibly flexible. You can easily construct one command that fits your requirements. Understanding the correct options, your requirements for every part of the tool chain, and their occasionally predictable down-the-road implications takes quite some time, admittedly. However, all professional tools require knowledge and doc reading and experience with the latest bleeding-edge tools and experimentation and luck, I assume. Once you get a few years of experience under your belt working with this tool chain (not skipping the 3-4 hours per day after work to keep up with the latest JS ecosystem updates for this and the other new stacks you’ll need to learn throughout the week) you’ll be able to craft a command that requires very little reading or luck to use, and it could work, unmodified, for days, if not a week. If it turns out to not actually do what you want, you probably want the wrong thing— just ask on SO. But one-and-done, friend. Set it and forget it. Second, this is all really easy if you just take the time to understand the tool chain. It’s just 4 or 19ish crucial, interdependent parts that all really should be in place from the very beginning and only most of them have inscrutable configuration schemas. Some are even documented! If you need more handholding than that, Sally, countless domain experts in countless online fora eagerly offer guidance like “go learn how X works first” or “lol that guide is weeks out of date— you have to use knippull.js instead of GROUNCE because GROUNCE was taken over by FlammBae last week and they’re just trying to sell add-ons for their data store and have ignored all PRs to support the latest version of SLAPPD which flibBleJs uses to transmogrify bNumbn{e}rs templates which you need for tr1xBits.js to work.” Once you understand how that all works, and understand how the generators implement those things, know how to compensate for the NBCF delta (Non-Backwards-Compatible Feature delta which calculates the number of implementation changes between typing the first character of your command and hitting enter,) theoretically your one-and-done is undeniably achievable. Finally, people overstate the complexity of fixing a project started with the wrong boilerplate. Just experiment a bit. Spend a few days trying all the options to see which welcome pages don’t look broken in your browser (unless, of course, you’re using Waggle with FlermBox) and then narrow it down a bit based on that, and then just pick one. You can always fix it if it’s wrong. A literal child could understand the concept of “delete your project and start fresh” so I don’t think it should be hard to explain the concept to experienced software developers. Developers used to paralyzingly straightforward legacy logic and organizational paradigms love to say that JS web dev tooling has the logical structure of a Wallace and Gromit short. They're completely ignoring the fact that this process was not designed— it evolved, and that’s okay. Not great, but okay. Ultimately, it might look a little weird and insane and fragile if you peel back the onion skin to see how the sausage gets its secret sauce— but you too can achieve the pinnacle of modern developer push-button convenience with JS.

simion314 5y ago

>Maybe 5-10 years ago, there is no need anymore Is still either create your own or install a random package that brings other 20 as dependencies. Example, you want to show an Alert or Yes/No popup, This are built-in everywhere but n Web world you need to review and install a third party thing, or create your own buggy or incomplete implementation. Maybe you want modal dialogs, this is a standard in GUI tookits but you need to create your own or install a package/module/plugin specific for your project shitty framework Maybe your designer demands a (context) menu one with keyboard shortucts and native looking like , or a scrollbar that matches the website/app theme colors or that works horizontally without holding Shift like in native apps, you have again to find 1 solution from a giant pile of shitty packages. The dropdows,scrollbars, number spinner, color picker inputs CSS customization is pathetic, the designers demand customization and the only solution is installing third party stuff. There is no DataGrid or ListView component with a smart implementation that can hold many items so all websites implement a crappy inefficient thing, or show you only 20 items and you need to hit NExt Page like a money or again you find a third party solution. As a language JS progressed a lot, so much I am not sure if switching to TS is a good idea or I just need to wait until JS will catch up with TS. But as a platform the Web /DOM is still garbage, CSS got some nice feature with flexbox but that is all. People that did not wrote complex desktop apps with a GUI framework will not understand this, and think that the shitty component they create by nesting 12 divs and catching 2 events is the exact same thing. It is not, this GUI frameworks components are efficient and handle all events/cases properly. Even Google devs were incapable to make the Youtube search suggestion dropdown work correctly, many times it gets stuck open and you can't close it without a reload.

Gare 5y ago
> As a language JS progressed a lot, so much I am not sure if switching to TS is a good idea or I just need to wait until JS will catch up with TS. Can you elaborate on this? TS is just adding type checking to JS, the only runtime addition are enums. I doubt that JS will incorporate type checking anytime soon. I mostly agree with your other points.
- simion314 5y ago