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by zelphirkalt 276 days ago
> This is an eco system that has taken code reuse to the (unreasonable) extreme.

Not even that actually. Actually the wheel is reinvented over and over again in this exact ecosystem. Many packages are low quality, and not even suitable to be reused much.

1 comments

The perfect storm of on the one side junior developers who are afraid of writing even trivial code and are glad if there's a package implementing functionality that can be done in a one-liner, and on the other side (often junior) developers who want to prove themselves and think the best way to do that is to publish a successful npm package
The blessing and curse of frontend development is that there basically isn't a barrier to entry given that you can make some basic CSS/JS/HTML and have your browser render it immediately.

There's also the flavor of frontend developer that came from the backend and sneers at actually having to learn frontend because "it's not real development"

Ha, that's a funny attitude. And here I was thinking, that mostly doing backend work, I rather make the best out of the situation, if I have to do frontend dev, and try to do "real development" by writing trivial things myself, instead of worsening the situation by gluing together mountains of bloat.
> There's also the flavor of frontend developer that came from the backend and sneers at actually having to learn frontend because "it's not real development"

What kind of code does this developer write?

As little code as possible to get the job done without enormous dependencies. Avoiding js and using css and html as much as possible.
Sounds like the perfect frontend dev to me.
The designer, the customer, and US/EU accessibility laws heavily disagree.
In my experience, generally speaking there is a kind of this developer that tries to write a language they’re familiar with, but in Javascript. As the pithy saying goes, it takes a lot of skill to write Java in every language.
Usually they write only prompts and then accept whatever is generated, ignoring all typing and linting issues
Prompts? React and Angular came out over 10 years ago. The left pad incident happened in 2016.

Let me assure you, devs were skeptical about all this well before AI.

People pushing random throwaway packages is not the issue.

A lot of the culture is built by certain people who make a living out of package maximalism.

More packages == more eyballs == more donations.

They have an agenda that small packages are good and made PRs into popular packages to inject their junk into the supply chain.