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The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

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Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#61

Post by tyingq »

nsonha wrote: post #59
tyingq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High tool churn creates an ecosystem where you get paid well for knowing the new hotness.

That's a myth. I've been in a lot of tech interviews, no one gives a shit about what tools you use. Maybe things like terraform or docker, but not the libraries or tools inside the projects, no. You get a pat in the back maybe.

Getting to the interview often means your resume making it past a recruiter that doesn't know much other than keyword matching. And there's plenty of job listings with granular things like redux, eslint, webpack, and so on in them.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#62

Post by ryohkyo »

Tesl wrote: post #24
dimgl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made an exception for TypeScript I was nodding my head until TypeScript. I still don't like it even after years of people telling me it's the future. Maybe this is what it feels like to be older.

Nah you're probably just wrong. Generally speaking it's the older more experienced developers who demand typescript in my experience. Writing raw javascript is genuinely painful, I literally don't understand how people can even do it. Like, how do you even refactor code safely?

I think that’s where unit tests come in. In Typescript, I have seen “any” type everywhere that doesn’t make things any clearer.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#63

Post by mattgreenrocks »

musingsole wrote: post #13
stevehind wrote: post #8

Out of curiosity what is the best counter argument to the general thesis, eg either what positives come entangled in the hot mess or reasons it’s not a hot mess?

That while it might be difficult to articulate, the churn of technologies does represent a meaningful search and forward march of progress. The churn is the result of ever more rapid progress on an increasingly abstract knowledge system. However, it is hard to recognize positive structural change as just another worker bee in the hive.

This is too simplistic. Progress is not inevitable. There is no guarantee that the objective being optimized by the JavaScript Community(tm) is necessarily a better one than before.

Churn can easily be driven by fashion as much as what you call “progress.”

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#64

Post by goatlover »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53

I can definitely appreciate rants like this, and I think anyone who has been in JS development for a while has hit some sort of dependency incompatibility headache like this. That said, I'm also always left a bit annoyed when the author isn't really introspective to think about what benefits came with the environment he is bitching about. As much as everyone loves to complain about "dependency hell" in the JS/Node ec…

> As much as everyone loves to complain about "dependency hell" in the JS/Node ecosystem, the fact that there are tons of high quality (or, at least discernible quality) components, largely for free, is something that really didn't exist before say the mid '00s.

CPAN for Perl and Java's rich set of libraries come to mind from before the mid 2000's.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#65

Post by 1ark »

To be fair, I have had the same problems with Java, C# and Python packages. It's simply not an easy problem[1] once the project dependencies grow. It is a bit more apparent in JavaScript ecosystem and it is cool to hate on ofc.

1. https://the-guild.dev/blog/how-should-you-pin-dependencies-a...

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#66

Post by holler »

Tesl wrote: post #24
dimgl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made an exception for TypeScript I was nodding my head until TypeScript. I still don't like it even after years of people telling me it's the future. Maybe this is what it feels like to be older.

Nah you're probably just wrong. Generally speaking it's the older more experienced developers who demand typescript in my experience. Writing raw javascript is genuinely painful, I literally don't understand how people can even do it. Like, how do you even refactor code safely?

> Like, how do you even refactor code safely?

for me I make sure to write thorough unit tests along with clear, concise code

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#67

Post by 1ark »

nayuki wrote: post #6

I'm embarrassed to admit that for web development, I'm afraid to try frameworks like React/Vue/Angular as well as package managers like NPM/Yarn. So I settled on writing raw (X)HTML code and using only vanilla JavaScript APIs provided by the browser (ECMAScript standard library, DOM, multimedia, etc.). Because of this, I can't bang out complicated software quickly and easily like the stereotypical front-end developer…

The browser environment enables you to do that, so why not. No dependencies. But do you build everything in house then (time unlimited), or the apps are not that complex? It is the same mindset as writing assembly or small Win32 in C, which I both admire and respect btw.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#69

Post by steve_adams_86 »

holler wrote: post #66
Tesl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah you're probably just wrong. Generally speaking it's the older more experienced developers who demand typescript in my experience. Writing raw javascript is genuinely painful, I literally don't understand how people can even do it. Like, how do you even refactor code safely?

> Like, how do you even refactor code safely? for me I make sure to write thorough unit tests along with clear, concise code

I think you can combine that with static types and come out further ahead.

To each their own though. I wrote code without any kind of autocomplete or tooling for a very long time because I felt like it. Sometimes when you don’t have something helping you all the time, it keeps you sharper.

Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is a hot mess and so is software development

#70

Post by [deleted] »

throwdecro wrote: post #3

This is a rant I can appreciate. Two subjective takes on the same subject: 1) As JavaScript became ascendant, it seems like developers lost their fear of dependencies, for some reason I don't understand. Dependencies came to be seen as "time saved" rather than "something out of your control that can hurt you." 2) When dependencies don't fit together, things fail in a way that makes it look as if the code is simply wr…

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