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by jack_riminton 1180 days ago
Glorious. This blog post by the creator on the insanity of the JS ecosystem is also a good read https://pouria.dev/programs-are-dead/
2 comments

The great irony of this post is that the author dreams of a world where they can use a library without it depending on hundreds of other modules, yet their website is built on Gatsby, an NPM package with one of the most insane dependency graphs I've seen. Uploading the author's website's package.json[1] into npmgraph[2] lists a total of 1561 dependencies. All that for what amounts to a simple blog site.

[1] https://github.com/poeti8/pouria.dev/blob/master/package.jso...

[2] https://npmgraph.js.org/

That's why I wrote the blog post.
But do you think there is a solution? Why do we have to bear such a painful ecosystem?May we are at an evolutionary stage where too much variety is proliferating, and over time things will converge into a few proven ways of doing things.
Thanks for writing it.

Whenever I see WebGL posts like yours & chiechanowski I think like these folks must really love JavaScript to create such masterpiece & with my apprehension towards the JS ecosystem I couldn't indulge myself to put such effort.

Your post on JS ecosystem resonates with me & perhaps there's a narrow gap for someone without liking the JS ecosystem could do something extraordinary with JavaScript.

Why not use a different tool then? Hugo or Zola are mature and provide static binaries. If you want to stay in the Node world, I can recommend tinyjam by mourner (or anything by Volodymyr, really).
The point of the article is to complain about the state of the JS ecosystem as a whole. Of course there are workarounds and alternatives but it doesn't detract from the main point.
I agree, it doesn't detract from the main point, and I understand the purpose of the article. I only find it surprising that the website is built with Gatsby given the author's stance.
Surely the stance can come after and because of building the website?

There's a lot of projects that've taught me exactly what tool I wouldn't use if I were redoing them from scratch, but there's no time to start again or no wish to go through a lot of extra pain and work (until needed) to end up with the same end result.

Looking in the browser devtools it seems to be a three.js application.
Looking into the dev tools also reveals that the page tries to load Google Analytics without consent. Not cool.
I'm sorry, I forgot about that. I removed Google Analytics from my personal website just now.
What an absurdly high bar that 99% of the sites on HN certainly don’t reach.
The law?
Laws are different in different countries. The internet is in all of them.

What is it that you’re looking for, a useless “this site uses cookies” warning? That can mean anything, from a site that has a simple login feature, to a site that participates in a network that tracks you across the internet. The legal requirement for that notification is a great example of futile regulation that achieves nothing but globally wasted productivity. It’s like having to warn people that you breathe - regulators focused on the wrong common factor.

If you care enough about the issue, there are plenty of off-the-shelf blockers you can install.

I didn't think it worth mentioning because it's blocked by uBlock Origin anyway ;)