[azangru]

> Find a professional front-end developer who is willing to use simple HTML, JS & CSS and I'd agree with you.

> It's almost impossible. The first reaction is always `npm init`

Consider a simple case — a static website containing several pages (it's simpler than anything requiring a dynamic server, right?). If you are a professional front-end developer, you are almost certain to prefer some kind of a static-site generator over copy-pasting the html template with repeated elements (header, footer, navigation) multiple times, because you know that copy-pasting will bite you when you need to change something. You could use a static-site generator written in Ruby (but then you would gem install), or in Python (but then you would pip install); or you could use a Hugo binary (I'd love to see anyone call its templating language simple); or, if you are a front-end developer, you might npm init && npm install eleventy. Is this too complex a step?

[marcus_holmes]

> or you could use a Hugo binary (I'd love to see anyone call its templating language simple)

I dunno, I'm a Go dev, so it makes sense to me ;)

> Is this too complex a step?

If it just stopped there, sure, that would be fine. But it never does. My experience of front-end devs is that they will do anything to avoid writing any actual code. So there's a tendency to pull in dependencies and bloat the thing until it suffocates in its own complexity. I've seen node_modules with thousands of subdirs, and a build process that takes minutes, for really very simple sites.