"This is a minimalistic JavaScript stack" "ES6, Babel, Gulp, ESLint, React, Redux, Webpack, Immutable, Mocha, Chai, Sinon, and Flow" brutal.
Nah, nobody's using Brutal anymore. That was last week.
Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
181–190 of 211 posts
Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#182This whole complicated stack of parts is why I don't really like React, you're never 100% sure if what you're doing is best practice. I find Ember to be much better, you only need to install Ember CLI and everything is put together for you.
Ember still has by far the best out of box experience and guides like this make that point painfully well. With Ember CLI you start at step 1, skip all the build steps (babel, webpack, etc...), and move on to learning the framework and getting some work done.
In the end you'll end up with a framework that already has a story for state management, api interaction, client side routing, and a complete testing story.
I've setup the described React stack many times. I like React as a view management library, but it requires a large amount of duct tape to get working and even once it is I still have to dedicate a lot of time to tweaking and maintaining all of these interconnected build steps. There are still tradeoffs that have made React a great choice some cases (namely its reliance on build duct tape allows it to be retrofitted into larger mature apps), but for apps I want to just work out of the box Ember/Ember CLI is an easy choice.
Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#183I 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…
Unix philosophy is "Make each program do one thing well", but they've made them once, many decades ago and haven't change them much since. The problem here IMHO is the speed at which it all evolves, and even more the speed at which the old tools become obsolete. You start a new project with the current 'cutting-edge' stack, and within the 6 months everyone switched to something else. It's become a full-time job just to stay up to date with everything that's going on, and that means making architecture decisions is a lot harder. Also, I personally dislike the fact that it forces one to pick a niche. For decades you could say "I'm good in front-end dev" and really mean it, and now it's not possible anymore to be truly proficient in all that's going on, you just have to specialize.
Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#184I 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…
"I love hearing a developer at a daily stand-up meeting saying he's been up all night..."
A phrase I heard from a much older, wiser developer: "heroism doesn't scale." If you encourage workaholic behavior don't be surprised if the team starts falling apart, or worse if their families suffer.
Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
How big is the nodemodules dir after installing these 12 "small tools" ?
Who cares? This is 2016, memory footprint hasn't been relevant in years.
Not just memory footprint (which is still at least somewhat relevant, and if you've never tried to delete a node_modules folder from Windows explorer you're in for a treat. More Microsoft's fault, but still annoying), but the sheer amount of trust required for all the dependencies. Only one of those tons of dependencies needs to be subverted to do something awful to you. The attack surface is much larger than it is in other environments.
Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#186Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you quoted me wrong :) The "guide" is minimalistic, not the stack. The point of making the guide minimalistic is to help folks feel less overwhelmed by the complexity of said stack.
I'm between entry-level and intermediate as a full-stack JavaScript dev, and I'm seeing these tools (or equivalents) as the basics used at the last couple jobs and the ones I'm applying to now. Really appreciate you putting this together. Thanks so much.
Glad I could help you my friend! :)
Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
The create-react-app tool from Facebook lets you create a "modern" (air quotes yours) web app with one development dependency and zero configuration. https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/07/22/create-apps... It's surprisingly full featured. Testing, ES6, CSS, live reload dev server, building for production ... everything you need for the majority of React based web app builds. Literally up and running in minute…
There's nothing modern about a website that does nothing without JavaScript
Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#189Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you happen to be born after 1996?
No. Is there something you are trying to imply that I'm missing?
This is 2016 and devices have more memory, that's true. But ignoring memory efficiency is ignoring the basic principle of engineering and I see younger folks tend to ignore that more than olders. Having more memory available does not mean that reduced footprints are not better.