The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
1–10 of 248 posts
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#2That would be a polite way to put it yes.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#3I wonder how much of this can be blamed on JS being a relatively gentle and forgiving codegen target.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#4I wonder how much of this can be blamed on JS being a relatively gentle and forgiving codegen target.
I suspect that if some accidents of history hadn't left JS as the only language you can use to script a Web browser, it would have died off long ago.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#5So JS is delightful because we are still not actually writing JS, but stuff that looks like JS? Huh.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#6Javascript is this generation's C++. It's a massive language and the only way to stay sane on a project is to agree to use a well demarcated subset of it.
Nothing wrong with being C++. The reason JS is so massive and weird is because it's the language that everybody uses, or has to use at some point. Upsides and downsides.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#7Coffeescript was well before "tree shaking" (the JS ecosystem's way of spelling "dead code removal") and code splitting, both being relatively new things in the bundler world ("tree shaking" being introduced with rollup if memory serves). Then came Acorn, which gave way to a whole slew of JS transformation bits.
It also didn't help that Node was fixed at 0.12 for years and years, and we had the IO.js fork until Node was released by Joyent for OSS community members to take over. That caused more issues to boot.
Also the whole bundling fiasco started with Babel, which wasn't a bundler at all and instead started as a means to provide polyfills for supporting "old browsers" (really, IE). From that whole thing came the concept of "evergreen browsers" which is a term that has largely fallen out of the common vocabulary with the rise of Edge.
Now we have "anything is a valid feature request" TC-39, and "it's really just Google at this point" browsers dictating how the web works.
It's a nightmare. As a maintainer of several large JS packages, and being so dreadfully burnt out on JS, there are other words I'd use to describe the whole thing than "delightful".
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#8I find this like saying you are actually writing binary code, what you code is not any language at all.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
#9So JS is delightful because we are still not actually writing JS, but stuff that looks like JS? Huh.
It's weird how JS is the only ecosystem entirely designed around the premise of avoiding direct contact with the language you're developing in at all costs.
Like, even C programmers are willing to actually write C.
Re: The JavaScript ecosystem is delightfully weird
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