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by joshuanapoli 702 days ago
The JavaScript ecosystem historically had a lot of turnover. Probably there are a lot of applications that repeatedly ported over the years: Ruby to JavaScript, to coffescript, to flow types (for React), to Typescript.

I think that these language ports aren’t as disruptive as architecture changes (waffling on microservices), and they’re driven by availability of talent. Porting to follow the trend makes it easier and much more pleasant to onboard new developers. It usually has a practical benefit to users, because the latest tooling usually has a performance edge, but doesn’t support the old language.
2 comments
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 702 days ago
I forget "JS and the web" all the time because I've been actively avoiding it for the past 20 years. It happens in other environments but the web seems to encourage "following the trend" and that would make me crazy if I had to do this every day.
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fhd2 702 days ago
I haven't seen good teams do that - there's reliable options even in the pretty crazy JS/web ecosystem. What it does have is a ton of junior devs and a lot of people pushing their open core startups or celebrity status with new libraries and tools where they could have contributed to something existing instead. There's more bad devs and more noise, but there absolutely is enough good people and good stuff to build solid software. Just have to get used to the noise I suppose.
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imvetri 702 days ago
Don't follow trend. JS and Web is bad may be bad. But building interface is not.
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blowski 702 days ago
Yes, good point. Even within React, there's been a big change from class components to functional components and hooks. I imagine LLMs could help with some of that.
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cjonas 702 days ago
I just ported 10k loc of react classes to function components using gpt-4o. The changes are mostly trivial, but would be fairly time consuming and tedious to make. It took me a few hours instead of a few days.
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bavell 702 days ago
Isn't this already possible with codemods?
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imvetri 702 days ago
No. Nobody can understand how to use code mods. I could not. But I'm not sure about others.

My view is that those engineers in fb are no longer there to promote and support that project. Or they would have migrated to learning ai ml

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bavell 701 days ago
Fair enough, I've never used them either!
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imvetri 702 days ago
How much did it cost?
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