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by cogman10
1019 days ago
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This push and pull on "programming language vs DSL" will be with us forever. Some people love maven because it's a concise DSL, easy to understand if you understand maven. Some people like gradle because it's a DSL with a major escape hatch in that it's also just the groovy programming language with all that entails. This dance has played out with the likes of the Javascript community. Just write a js script, no actually we need a pipeline so let's use grunt. Actually we hate grunt so let's use gulp, actually gulp is just wrong lets get declarative with webpack. Actually that's too inflexible and weedy let's just use a framework (like react-scripts) which just runs our code and gets out of the way. After 10+ years of programming, it seems like we are on an endless loop of "let the framework do everything" to "let's enable maximum flexibility with a full programming language". (see ant in the java world for an even earlier version of this). It seems like the push and pull is this constant problem that "describing the problem is hard, and messing up that description makes everything more complex to maintain". The lack of flexibility feels nice because there's less to mess up, but then when something really complex arises you usually end up doing something 10x more nasty than you would with an ultimate flexibility framework. On the flip side, super flexible frameworks lend themselves to being completely unique butterflies that require a heavy up front research to understand (as, you don't know what that foo method is doing and why it does it). They can 1x the complex situation but it feels like the tendency is to want to overcomplicate simple problems by reinventing a framework for your company. (My company is dealing with this and jenkins pipelines) |
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Ah - you're a young whippersnapper! I lived through those changes. I never understood why people thought it was a good idea to have a build-pipeline for an interpreted language like Javascript. But my colleagues did; grunt->gulp->laravel->nodejs->react, with a parallel succession of CSS compilers. That was in just the 5 years before I retired. It became a sort of Red Queen race; you have to run just to stand still.
I'm glad I'm out of it.