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The JavaScript ecosystem historically had a lot of turnover. Probably there are a lot of applications that repeatedly ported over the years: Ruby to JavaScript,
by joshuanapoli 2y ago
The JavaScript ecosystem historically had a lot of turnover. Probably there are a lot of applications that repeatedly ported over the years: Ruby to JavaScript, to coffescript, to flow types (for React), to Typescript.
I think that these language ports aren’t as disruptive as architecture changes (waffling on microservices), and they’re driven by availability of talent. Porting to follow the trend makes it easier and much more pleasant to onboard new developers. It usually has a practical benefit to users, because the latest tooling usually has a performance edge, but doesn’t support the old language.
- blowski 2y agoYes, good point. Even within React, there's been a big change from class components to functional components and hooks. I imagine LLMs could help with some of that.
- cjonas 2y agoI just ported 10k loc of react classes to function components using gpt-4o. The changes are mostly trivial, but would be fairly time consuming and tedious to make. It took me a few hours instead of a few days.
- bavell 2y agoIsn't this already possible with codemods?
- _f9cu 2y agoNo. Nobody can understand how to use code mods. I could not. But I'm not sure about others. My view is that those engineers in fb are no longer there to promote and support that project. Or they would have migrated to learning ai ml
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bavell 2y agoFair enough, I've never used them either!
- _f9cu 2y agoHow much did it cost?
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoI forget "JS and the web" all the time because I've been actively avoiding it for the past 20 years. It happens in other environments but the web seems to encourage "following the trend" and that would make me crazy if I had to do this every day.
- fhd2 2y agoI haven't seen good teams do that - there's reliable options even in the pretty crazy JS/web ecosystem. What it does have is a ton of junior devs and a lot of people pushing their open core startups or celebrity status with new libraries and tools where they could have contributed to something existing instead. There's more bad devs and more noise, but there absolutely is enough good people and good stuff to build solid software. Just have to get used to the noise I suppose.
- _f9cu 2y agoDon't follow trend. JS and Web is bad may be bad. But building interface is not.