4 ms·
I find Rome/Biome quite fascinating. Not the tools themselves. I just find it really interesting that Rome made so much noise and got so much press before they
by jemmyw 1y ago
I find Rome/Biome quite fascinating. Not the tools themselves. I just find it really interesting that Rome made so much noise and got so much press before they ever had anything worth talking about. People kept posting in work chats about it over the years: this will solve so many problems etc. What will? I'd ask. There's nothing there yet.
And did we ever need this tool? Prettier and eslint are different beasts, both pretty good, and integrate well together. But again, it's not the tools themselves that are interesting, it's the way Rome was talked about so much without existing. When prettier appeared it was just released: "here is a new tool to format things, it's much faster than what we had before." It then took a long time to permeate and become essential, and it improved along the way, became multi language etc. Prettier is a thing, a tool, it has no mission other than what it does. Rome was an idea without a tool, and it never came to fruition.
You could make some kind of conclusion about this, that oss projects based on grand ideas are doomed, you need code to be released first, to build on and grow. But I don't think that conclusion in itself is that interesting, certainly not novel. What's interesting is why did Rome happen, why did the people behind it drive it in that way? Why did so many get excited by it? It's so very similar to companies that hype themselves stratospherically and often fail. Except at least there is a point to their hype: get investment money and try and use that money to make the hype reality. I don't understand the purpose behind the same thing with Rome. It really itches at me to know more, to understand. To understand why it appealed so much to my peers, it's just linting and formatting, we have that already, and any new tool will start with rough edges. Sometimes you see similar a sort thing with projects and think it's based on aggrandizement of the dev behind it, but those projects peter out quickly. Rome kept it going for years.
- lucideer 1y agoIt got press because one of the founders was heavily involved in creating Yarn & very publicly critical of Yarn 2. That general repute (both positive & negative) brought attention to Rome. That's all there was to it.
- tshaddox 1y agoAt least in the JavaScript community (perhaps not the wider tech community) I would say that Sebastian McKenzie was even more well known as the creator of Babel.
- sureIy 1y agoJS tooling has been a mess since its inception. Here came Rome with promises of it just working and doing everything at once. Of course people sucked it up. Now whenever I read of "upcoming tools" I couldn't care less. Show me the tool and then we can talk. I'm still waiting for the features that Webpack 4 promised a decade ago.
- lucideer 1y ago> JS tooling has been a mess since its inception Broadly, you're not wrong. But I see this sort of exceptionalism quite a lot: "<ecosystem> tooling is terrible". Terrible relative to what? I work with tooling across a wide range of languages - some do it better than others but I wouldn't say JS is exceptionally bad relative to others. E.g. Python tooling has been some of the worst for a long time. Recently Astral have been making positive changes to this (& I note the cross-pollination of Astral & BiomeJS devs) but across the ecosystem things are broadly still terrible on average, especially in fragmentation terms. C/C++ has less of a fragmentation issue & more of a non-adoption-of-anything-standard-at-all issue (Make doesn't count when every Makefile is custom). Java tooling isn't too fragmented as long as you're an IDE user - but it's so locked into UIs & the cli tooling is horrific. There's problems all over. JS is honestly one of the least worst I've seen.
- dhruvrajvanshi 1y agoI think you're being too negative about why people got excited. It is quite a bit faster than eslint. Not saying it's a good food idea to use it. I think it asks too much out of me to migrate to it. If they had been even somewhat compatible with eslint, I'd have given it a shot.
- jemmyw 1y agoThey got excited before it existed, at the promise of it being faster
- sibeliuss 1y agoNo more eslint plugins? Minimal config? It makes perfect sense why people were excited. It's less about the speed and more about consolidating tooling.