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The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

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Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#41

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

conartist6 wrote: post #23
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been very lost trying to understand the ecosystem between es versions , typescript and everything else. It ends up being a weird battle between seemingly unrelated things like require() vs import vs async when all I want to do is compile. All while I’m utterly confused by all the build tools, npm vs whatever other ones are out there, vite vs whatever other ones are out there, ‘oh babel? I’ve heard the name but n…

Yes, yes to all of that, but there is still hope.

This fancy new build tool with emojis will fix it!

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#42

Post by stephenr »

rtpg wrote: post #27

I think on the first point, we have to start calling out authors of packages which (IMO) have built out these deptrees to their own subpackages basically entirely for the purpose of getting high download counts on their github account Like seriously... at 50 million downloads maybe you should vendor some shit in. Packages like this which have _7 lines of code_ should not exist! The metadata of the lockfile is bigger…

As usual, he's copying someone else who's been doing this for years:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-number - and then look and see shit like is odd, is even (yes two separate packages because who can possibly remember how to get/compare the negated value of a boolean??)

Honestly for how much attention JavaScript has gotten in the last 15 years it's ridiculous how shit it's type system really is.

The only type related "improvement" was adding the class keyword because apparently the same people who don't understand "% 2" also don't understand prototypal inheritance.

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#43

Post by kennywinker »

dfabulich wrote: post #21
fragmede wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just how old an Android device in the developing world do you not want to support? Life's great at the forefront of technology, but there's a balancing act to be able to support older technology vs the bleeding edge.

Android phones update to the latest version of Chrome for 7 years. As long as you're using browser features that are Baseline: Widely Available, you'll be using features that were working on the latest browsers in 2023; those features will work on Android 7.0 Nougat phones, released in 2016. Android Studio has a nifty little tool that tells you what percentage of users are on what versions of Android. 99.2% of users…

3.9 billion android users, means that 0.8% is 31 million people - and for a very small number of developers most of their users will be from that slice. For most of them… yeah go ahead an assume your audience is running a reasonably up to date os

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#44

Post by cobbzilla »

cwnyth wrote: post #26
andai wrote: post #17

Great article, but I think these are all marginal. The main cause of bloat is not polyfills or atomic packages. The cause of bloat is bloat! I love this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince): "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing to take away." Most software is not written like that. It's not asking "how can we make this more elegant?" It's asking "what'…

Cf. Vonnegut's rule #4 of good writing: > Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. Or Quintilian's praise of Demosthenes and Cicero: "To Demosthenes nothing can be added, but from Cicero nothing can be taken away."

Is there no room for describing the setting? Must every utterance that sets the atmosphere also advance the plot or reveal character? Is there no room for mood?

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#45

Post by martijnvds »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #33
rtpg wrote: post #27

I think on the first point, we have to start calling out authors of packages which (IMO) have built out these deptrees to their own subpackages basically entirely for the purpose of getting high download counts on their github account Like seriously... at 50 million downloads maybe you should vendor some shit in. Packages like this which have _7 lines of code_ should not exist! The metadata of the lockfile is bigger…

> entirely for the purpose of getting high download counts on their github account Is this an ego thing or are people actually reaping benefits from this? Anthropic recently offered free Claude to open source maintainers of repositories with over X stars or over Y downloads on npm. I suppose it is entirely possible that these download statistics translate into financial gain...

I've seen people brag about it in their resumes, so I assume it helps them find (better paying?) work.

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#47

Post by kennywinker »

est wrote: post #24

More like a nodejs bloat rather than JS bloat. For personal objects I always prompt the AI to write JS directly, never introduce nodejs stack unless absolutely have to. Turns out you don't always need Nodejs/Reactto make a functional SPA.

You’ve traded supply chain vulnerability for slop vulnerability.

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#48

Post by hombre_fatal »

cobbzilla wrote: post #44
cwnyth wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cf. Vonnegut's rule #4 of good writing: > Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. Or Quintilian's praise of Demosthenes and Cicero: "To Demosthenes nothing can be added, but from Cicero nothing can be taken away."

Is there no room for describing the setting? Must every utterance that sets the atmosphere also advance the plot or reveal character? Is there no room for mood?

> Is there no room for describing the setting? Is there no room for mood?

You mean the character of a place?

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