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by kyeb 2214 days ago
As a computer scientist who learned JavaScript this year, I strongly agree with the sentiment here. I feel like I often spend more time debugging module errors than my actual project.

Granted, once I understood the ecosystem more, I gradually began to grasp the reason these issues are around. But still, it does make it incredibly frustrating as a reasonably decent coder getting started in JavaScript.
3 comments
wayneftw 2213 days ago
As a programmer who has been using JS heavily since the late 90s and now doing mostly React and Node.js, I would say that finding the right modules and patterns to use has always been a big part of the job. It takes a lot of searching, experimenting, learning, judging code quality and reading the tea leaves on package stability and popularity.

Things have largely gotten much, much better for JavaScript though ever since Node and NPM came along. It's easier to find the right modules to use or at least the right ideas to borrow. Package overload paralysis still happens at times, but I'd personally always rather have more, rather than less choice.

The constant rate of change does make me feel like I'm always re-learning a new way to do the same old job, but luckily for me - learning potentially better ways of doing the same old thing continues to be enjoyable.

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rraghur 2213 days ago
Like many others, I'm chiming in with a me-too... IMO the biggest problem is that if you come back to JS after a hiatus, it's very likely that most of what you thought you knew would probably have changed in the interim.

I mostly work on the backend.. However, I've done a decent amount of JS too. In fact, back in 2015, even built a lot of the core parts of an SPA using a mix of knockout & requirejs with minified bundles and dynamic loading and so on. Given that it stuff put together from scratch, I though picking things up after a couple of years away from js would be easy. Oh how wrong I was...

In 2017/18 sought to write a starter boilerplate with vue 2, Typescript and .NET Core. I would have probably spent an order of magnitude effort more fixing build issues and warnings than on the project. Once you hit bugs/issues with 3rd party webpack modules (which is almost a given), it is not fun at all.

I recently had to put up a one page visualization and was not looking forward to it. Surprisingly, create-react-app just worked out of the box. Not much of a data point - but still a pleasant experience.

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lukeramsden 2213 days ago
> Surprisingly, create-react-app just worked out of the box.

create-react-app is the only thing I've used in the ecosystem that hasn't catastrophically broken for me due to some years-old issue.

Except for monorepos/yarn workspaces, that still doesn't have first class support[0]

[0] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/1333

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caogecym 2213 days ago
Totally agree. react starter is awesome, never need to look back how to do that require import again :)
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caogecym 2213 days ago
The worst node module import issue I’ve encountered is with bootstrap react Navbar component. It runs fine locally but wouldn’t build in ci, and after an hour of troubleshooting it turns out that the B is capitalized (NavBar)... so WTF it works locally?...
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SlashmanX 2213 days ago
Running on Windows machine vs Unix based tends to highlight issues regarding case sensitivity
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