I
love this ecosystem.
It's living, it's thriving.
I love the fact that tons of great engineers are coming up with new ideas everyday to make my life as a developer easier.
I love hearing a developer at a daily stand-up meeting saying he's been up all night trying out a new shiny thing and concluding by saying it also solves a big issue we had in our product and here's the pull request (timestamp 4am).
The hype is here for a reason. Hype is nothing bad, being excited about your tools makes your days happier.
I love the fact that JS people are never going to take "No" for an answer, constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and making the web standards improve. I love the rise of functional programming. JS is a playground where mathematical theory and all of its beauty meets practice and the real world. It attracts talented people who bring a new perspective to our field. I love the fact that now I have theorems that ensure my login button will work.
> I'm a little lost at why we're using both Webpack and Gulp though.
Same here. I think one of the huge benefits of webpack is that it actually kills a lot of complexity by allowing you to skip gulp/grunt in most cases.
I think most people do not realize that the JS ecosystem is actually removing complexity.
Most people think the JS ecosystem is overly complicated, when in fact, it's just that in JS the complexity is exposed. This allows us to focus on reducing it. In order to address an issue, you must first make it visible.
Nowadays the trend in JS is to use multiple small tools that solve specific issues very well. We have a complexity in setup in exchange for less complexity in development. I argue this is a good thing, because setup is easy to document and only happens once in a project. Whereas you face development complexity every day.
This part from the tutorial is very significant to me:
> I recommend writing everything from scratch yourself
Yes! Yes! Yes! That's the heart of the JS philosophy: the ecosystem is trying very hard to make you understand what you are doing and why. It's giving you the keys to question what you're told and improve it. It's also why there's so much trolling. It's a good thing, question what seems too complex so that people can tackle the issue.
Please, do keep saying JS sucks, it's exactly what makes it so strong.
Do not use a framework, wire-up things yourself so that tomorrow you can repair it or upgrade it easily.
Do not write your router from scratch. But do connect the standard-issue router to your business logic yourself. Don't let someone else plug it in for you. It'll fit, but it won't look as good as if it were custom-made by a great tailor.
Finally, I love the config files. I hear a lot of trolling about all the config files, but I love the fact that I don't need to tell both webpack and mocha how to transpile JS and can just let the .babelrc tell them and everyone else. It's amazing that you can just git clone something and have all your environment setup as the author intended: language variant, linting... with .eslintrc developers using IntelliJ and atom both see the same messages.
Long live JS, or whatever comes next as we improve it!