Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

Post by fourthark » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 11:46 PM UTC

nightski wrote: post #64

ng12 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think you get to a standard library? How do you package the best tools when you don't know what the best tools are?

How long do you think something like that should take? It's already been 25 years... I think it says something about the browser ecosystem and the language itself. The entire WPF ecosystem for example was developed and refined in a fraction of this period. Heck even .NET itself is only 14 years old.

Post by vcarl » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 12:05 AM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #91

khc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason most of us dislike the ecosystem isn't because therre are many libraries and tools in the stack. In the C-world, every time you type 'make' I am probably executing two dozen different programs, so we are very comfortable with "Make each program do one thing well". The problem that most of us dislike the javascript/web ecosystem is that those set of libraries and tools keep changing every couple yea…

I don't buy that either. The youngest thing on that list is yarn, but aside from that everything is a few years old at least. And nobody is saying you need to use anything. Npm works fine, bower still works fine, hell pulling down tarballs still works fine. You don't need to use the newest thing if you don't have the problems it's trying to solve.

    Grunt > Gulp > Webpack
    manual polyfills > 6to5 > Babel
    script tags > bower > NPM > Yarn
    nothing > Flow/Typescript

Post by jonaf » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 12:08 AM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #8

anon1253 wrote: post #3

I appreciate the effort, certainly do. But, and this a big but: the amount of tooling, libraries, complexity and systems needed for a "modern" web app is almost comical at this point.

Are you sure it doesn't seem that way to you because you're less familiar with the ecosystem? Compare it to a Java backend. You might pick Ant, Ivy, Docker, Dropwizard, Guice, Jersey, Jackson, Mockito, JUnit, etc. I don't consider that to be radically less complex than the front-end stack proposed here -- but it just seems that way because a lot of those are "de facto" tools.

Post by gotofritz » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 12:14 AM UTC

stevoski wrote: post #61

From section 1 of the tutorial: > Since it came out in October 2016, [Yarn] received a very quick adoption and is becoming the new package manager of choice of the JavaScript community. We are going to use Yarn in this tutorial. It's October 2016 as I write. Tell me this tutorial is satire. Please.

Post by Klathmon » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 12:42 AM UTC

djfm wrote: post #84

nulagrithom wrote: post #46

I feel like the people complaining about how many libraries there are in this stack don't know what these tools do. Most are small tools that do one thing very well. Yarn installs packages, much like Gem, NuGet, whatever. Pretty standard. React is a frontend framework. Not surprising that you'd use one. I suppose you could opt to write a giant pile of vanilla JavaScript instead (I'm assuming you're not using this kit…

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 he…