Just spent an hour this morning helping a customer's 2 js devs do a hello world setup because of the first one. And even as someone experienced here, it still took me 10-15min to untangle the core issues. (In this case, enabling esm as in the article, instructing babel to preserve module imports, and then some whackamole of individual imports.) Every individual step made sense in isolation, just not in aggregate.
Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
341–350 of 391 posts
Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're kidding, right? Just going through the Concepts of webpack doesn't even scratch the surface - and will arguably leave many unsuspecting devs more confused than before, by e.g. still insisting on calling itself a "module bundler". You're a build system, ffs!
You cannot learn programming just by reading. Try using it in practice. The concepts part should be enough to get you started for a simple vanilla JavaScript project. If you need more (e.g. TypeScript/JSX/CSS support), You will need some third-party loaders or plugins. webpack itself is just a JavaScript bundler.
Well duh.
So it's "You just need to go through the webpack Concepts section"...except if you want to actually do some work with it.
See, that's the thing:
If like OP you are an experienced developer freshly coming to web frontend development, the Concepts pages of the webpack docs will tell you very little that you'd find unfamiliar. It's stuff that you've seen a variation of in countless other build systems. (At least that's how it was with me all those years ago.)
But as the docs themselves say: "Plugins are the backbone of webpack". And that's where Pandora's box opens...and where the designation as "just a JavaScript bundler" becomes ridiculous.
Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
It only makes sense because you understand the decisions behind it. Try teaching JS to someone with little experience — they don’t care that the browser wants one kind of module and Node wants another. They don’t know what a module is, they just want their code to run
> Try teaching JS to someone with little experience which is why js is not a good language to start teaching someone without experience in another language (including the ecosystem). To learn js, it is necessary to learn about the module system that evolved from the browser (and the hacks made in the past, prior to having a module system). Then you must learn that node.js and npm, and optionally, webpack and/or other…
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Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a construction worker, a recruiter and a mechanical Engineer, among other random professions, that moved to JS without much trouble. It somehow seems overwhelmingly that it's other fellow devs that have trouble with getting started JS. TBF right now JS is in transition from commonjs to ESM, and we all believe for the better, but this transition period does yield some strange issues like the article said, for i…
But the problem is, JS has been in a transition from some X to some Y for the last 10 years.
commonjs to ESM is the first truly breaking change that the JS ecosystem has experienced, everything else was a lot smoother
Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Having just gone through all of this (two years ago), it isn’t “hard”, you just have to stop assuming it’s easy and will only take a bit. So it isn't hard - it's just not easy and it's time consuming. Wait, what?
Correct, I deal with "difficulty" as a spectrum. The consensus so far here seems to be that this is "hard". I disagree, I think it's not "easy" but surely not "hard" either. Somewhere in between, leaning closer to "easy". Mostly it takes the willingness to learn and patience to recognize that it's a whole class of knowledge, separate from actually writing a javascript app.
Ok, I see where you're coming from. I'd call that "tedious" and "taking up a lot of time I'd rather spend productively". ;)
But snark aside - good point with the reference to Parcel. I haven't had time yet to delve into the new generation of JS tooling that have come up in the last few years, but yeah - its approach looks much saner. (vite also looks promising.)
Its' just...sigh maybe I'm just a bit jaded WRT to project age/maturity. I mean, it's only 4 years old! At least it has a V2 already. ;)
Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I rarely, if ever, have to reach for anything outside of the standard library for computation/algorithms. ES6 added most, if not all, the building blocks to build 99% of the computation you'll ever need. What's missing that you'd deem as worthless?
> ES6 added most, if not all, the building blocks to build 99% of the computation you'll ever need. What's missing that you'd deem as worthless? Not the same person, but date/time manipulation is one area I've encountered that's incredibly frustrating (especially when timezones are involved) without libraries like moment. Cross-browser functionality only compounds the issues.
Ah yes, I'd agree with that. To be fair though as well, many languages have struggled there; re: Java/Joda/Java 8's java.time
Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The module system fragmentation is the worst thing that can happen to a language. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything remotely close to a bridge between CommonJS & ESM so both can coexist peacefully. If you turn towards one, node starts screaming about how ESM modules can't contain require and if you go the other way, well then CommonJS doesn't have import. It's possible it's more confusing on backend node, but…
You don't realize what's required for all that to work properly. Webpack + Babel at the least. Expecting that a beginner developer will have to learn these to write even simple programs is absurd.
I set up the project myself, so, yes, I do know what's required. :)
For this project, `vue create my-project` and choosing TypeScript was sufficient.
I've done it before by configuring webpack and babel by hand, and yes, that can be a pain. I certainly wouldn't recommend a beginner start with that, but the existence of complicated options doesn't disqualify the simple solutions.
Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps the interviewers are under-experienced, under-perpared and/or under-trained? True story: I had an interview a couple of weeks ago. I was interviewed by two people who were younger than me, and relatively less experienced than me. My CV has a number of links to repos for various side projects and such. Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute. Not a single "Your ____ repo l…
> Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute. I once interviewed a guy with a nice, short 1-pager résumé—not from lack of experience, just a solid, terse document. Not just out of school. Had three or four tech jobs in his history. He listed one research paper near the bottom, that he'd co-authored in grad school. I found the paper, skimmed it, and asked him about it in the interview (…
I think it's a good approach. My position is: we're considering a possible long term relationship. We both have an interest in this meeting. That is, I hold as many cards as you do.
Those that see it otherwise? That to me a culture red flag. It's an easy swipe left.
Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#349sounds like the same experience I have with pretty much every language I'm not used to. I just want to try this C++, download, unzip, oh it's windows so .project file. Fine, redo on windows , oh it's 3 versions of vstuido old and says it wants to upgrade , okay. Hmm errors. Try to fix. Now it's getting linking error. repeat the same with xcode and any project in c, c++, objc, swift okay how about ruby? oh I have old…
I agree that the C family has some similar problems but I think you're missing part of what makes Javascript uniquely frustrating. Javascript is deployed in many different environments and you need to learn not just how to include a library in each environment, but also how to interact with that library. Also unlike C or other languages - Javascript has a hard time warning you about when you've imported something the…
Hello world in JS doesn't require WebPack in any environment. This JS file will run just fine in both the browser, node, deno, whatever:
console.log("Hello, World")
Meanwhile, if you're interested in using someone else's code, the CDNs are all still there. Vue, JQuery, lodash, and many other libraries are available for import directly into your HTML file.
A lot of people in this thread are conflating "all the tutorials tell beginners to do things the hard way" with "JavaScript is now a harder language to get started with than it once was".
Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem here is that there's so many tutorials, articles etc telling people that if they want to do data analysis then the best way is to use Python without making it clear that this advice is predicated on you already having a programming education. If you start with a CSV file and want to do some analysis, without knowing programming, then you need to using a spreadsheet app, but this context isn't bein…
It's no different in woodworking. I'm constantly turned off when I try to start by the fact that basically every easy-to-find woodworking tutorial assumes you have 3-4 different power saws already ready to go in your garage. It's hard to find content that gets you started with basic tools on small, inexpensive projects. Experts in any field are usually terrible teachers because they don't understand anymore what it m…
Something like this: https://famousartisan.com/diy_2x6_deck_chair_plans/
Would be very easy to make with basic hand tools. In fact, what might be fun is to just look at the picture of that, and try to reverse engineer the parts for it. (I teach woodworking classes, and this is actually an exercise I make the students do in one of the classes).
This saw would be fine: https://www.amazon.com/CRAFTSMAN-Hand-20-Inch-Finish-CMHT208...
If you can afford it, something like this will last you a very long time (probably a lifetime): https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-12-Inch-15-Amp-Compound-DWS715...
If you really want something that will definitely last you a lifetime (or two): https://www.amazon.com/SKILSAW-SPT88-01-Drive-Bevel-Sliding/...
If you want something that is pretty good at most things, get this: https://www.amazon.com/SKILSAW-SPT77WML-01-15-Amp-Lightweigh...
This is a handheld saw, but it's a very nice one, and could absolutely be used to make many, many things out of wood. You can use it for almost anything, and people do.
Another thing which you will use all the time (and I mean ALL the time, regardless of if you are doing woodworking or not) is a good set of handheld drills: https://www.amazon.com/Milwaukee-2697-22CT-18-Volt-Lithium-I...
If you want a long series of videos to watch, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...