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by frigo_1337 3546 days ago
I'm getting tired of these pointless non-specific rants. You could write an article about "How it feels to learn C++ in 2016" and make it all about the complexities of operating systems, linking, compilation, text editors and the QWERTY keyboard layout, and you'd still be as accurate.

All you need to "JavaScript in 2016" (as a beginner) is a config file and one or two commands. That's it. If that's too information or too hipstery for your taste, then follow the footsteps of other programming languages and use an IDE with a button that can hide that complexity for you.
3 comments
justinsaccount 3546 days ago
> All you need to "JavaScript in 2016" (as a beginner) is a config file and one or two commands

And 3 months from now in 2017 those 2 commands will be deprecated because no one uses those programs anymore.

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frigo_1337 3546 days ago
As far as beginners are concerned, that shouldn't really matter.

Hide all that complexity in a `./build.sh` or `make` and hand them a config and a README. The author of the article is a web designer with a slightly technical problem to solve. He didn't even need to know about gulp, or grunt, or webpack or babel. Those tools are (should be) as relevant to his domain as the tools used to manufacture the circuits that run them.

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justinsaccount 3546 days ago
Not everyone is a beginner web designer. Some people are trying to build things from scratch using JS.

"Just use this magic build.sh!" sounds a lot like "Just use this magic starter kit!" or "Just use yeoman!"

Who is supposed to write this 'build.sh' in this scenario of yours?

Without fail, every single magic build system or magic starter project I have ever used is now deprecated and abandoned.

  Makefiles? No one uses those anymore, use Grunt!
  Grunt?  No one uses that anymore, use Gulp!
  Gulp?  No one uses that anymore, use webpack!
I have a react app that I built on top of a starter kit that I now need to rebuild using create-react-app because the build process broke when I tried updating something.

Meanwhile, I can pick up a python project I worked on 10 years ago, or a go project I started 4 years ago and everything works exactly the same.

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bandrami 3546 days ago
The number of libraries is too high, but the bigger issue is the speed at which each one is replaced. I thought the ruby ecosystem was bad 10 years ago, and the python ecosystem bad 5 years ago, but these are like sloths on Vicodin compared to the absurd rate at which the JS community seems to adopt and deprecate libraries and frameworks and whatever else they're calling them today.

The worst thing is, every single thing these frameworks are trying to address are solved problems, and have been for decades. But people love reinventing wheels.

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phreack 3546 days ago
I don't think there are any stable ones, even Jetbrains' IDEs bang their head with all the JS tools' complexity nowadays.
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