[systematical]

JavaScript wasn't too complex back in the HTML/CSS days though. Lets be honest, we viewed it as a toy to sprinkle in some slick UI. Then some jQuery scripts started getting really out of control. Then I think ember and angular came out, or maybe it was backbone. Then things just kind of got more and more complex. Webpack is insane to learn. I finally took the time to learn it in isolation with es6, away from the heavy frameworks, and it wasn't so bad. But then when I look at using it with the heavy frameworks it makes me want to run for the hills.

I was playing around with puppeteer recently, which is a fantastic tool. It's perfect for what I needed. After I put together an ugly procedural proof of concept I wanted to figure out how to do things right and move it into classes. It's an adventure figuring out the right way to layout a project or even the right way to build a class. The fact that there isn't an authoritative answer tells me the eco-system is not mature or maybe I just didn't Google it right.

Meanwhile, PHP has https://www.php-fig.org/psr/. So anytime I can't remember how to name an Interface or an Abstract or anything really, I just google $blah + php psr. JavaScript is a shitshow that I have to live with, unfortunately. I know its funny coming from a guy that just used PHP as example for good language design, but at least the community has coalesced around standards...and composer > npm.

Its to the point now that I actively avoid making dynamic pages and SPAs AT ALL COSTS. It reduces the complexity of the code a ton that way. Thats not to say I haven't. I used VueJS for a big SPA because marketing wanted feature sets that required it. I fought it and lost. VueJS wasn't so bad, at least the learning curve was less than React, but SPAs are still terribad. Yuck.