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Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

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Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#71

Post by bowsamic »

jiggawatts wrote: post #56
gernb wrote: post #31

sounds 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…

Meanwhile I've been trying to warn the Rust project team, or more specifically, the Cargo/Crates teams that they're cheerfully skipping down the easy/happy path towards the same mess. It's inevitable that the conclusion will be the same if the same steps are taken in the same direction. The counter-arguments fail to recognise the special case of "most of us are from Mozilla and we all get along[1]", "no-one has attac…

Yep, the Rust team and even the wider community are literally just ignoring this problem under the justification of "it's too early to care about these things yet".

Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#72

Post by alexb_ »

alexb_ wrote: post #63

This thread is also a good read: https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1522633160483385345 Shows that a lot of people, ESPECIALLY programmers, vastly overestimate the competence of the average person when it comes to whatever they are an expert at. You may think that this person is silly - but that is tainted by your past experience of already knowing it warping what you think the baseline average knowledge level is…

Was going to edit this in but it quickly turned into a related rant about the state of things: if you don't want that, scroll past.

The real problem is that there's no more room for the technological "middle class". We've gotten to the point where you cannot be SLIGHTLY interested in computers, want to make a quick app for yourself, or make something small to share with the world. You either have to have no interest at all (and live in blissful ignorance) or be so into this type of stuff that you might as well just make it a career. In between these two extremes lies a valley of frustration and needless complexity, where everything is always breaking and changing because we found out what was used 2 years ago is actually bad but THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT! because now we found a solution that is totally going to work forever this time. It's exhausting to even think about.

Many people got their start programming with something like messing with simple Visual Basic stuff. I, and I'm sure many others who are reading this, started with a TI-83 and a desire to cheat on my math quiz. I know that I'm going a little off the rails here, and this has become more of a rant than anything meaningful, but I really, really hate how there's quickly becoming no space for that sort of thing - nowhere for people formerly uninterested in technology and programming to get their feet wet, nowhere to make a quick application to accomplish a small task, etc..

Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#73

Post by vaughandroid »

jiggawatts wrote: post #56
gernb wrote: post #31

sounds 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…

Meanwhile I've been trying to warn the Rust project team, or more specifically, the Cargo/Crates teams that they're cheerfully skipping down the easy/happy path towards the same mess. It's inevitable that the conclusion will be the same if the same steps are taken in the same direction. The counter-arguments fail to recognise the special case of "most of us are from Mozilla and we all get along[1]", "no-one has attac…

You've obviously thought about this quite a bit... Do you have any ideas as to how projects could avoid this problem?

Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#75

Post by noufalibrahim »

It says quite a bit that when I got started coding (with minimal access to the internet) and not much experience understanding "cryptic" error messages, I was able to compile the Linux kernel and bootstrap gcc without a native compiler on Solaris.

My day job used to mostly be Python. It can be a confusing ecosystem. I teach it to students and I can see the trouble they have. Other languages are different. With C projects, I can mostly get them to work. In fact, it's not too hard to even compile nodeJS from scratch. I've even had some amount of luck fumbling in the dark with languages I'm not familiar with to submit pull requests.

Javscript is a whole different ballgame though and I fully sympathise with John. It's very counter intuitive and even when I've been in the thick of it, I've had to squint quite a bit to make sense of how the ecosystem operated.

Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#76

Post by norman784 »

etamponi wrote: post #16

I can feel the author, in particular about the mess that is node_modules resolutions (and the fact that it sounds like 99% of "tutorials" - or even package READMEs - about Node seem to be written by someone that didn't really think things through). Anyway: I think the underlying problem is that it has been hidden that Node is NOT JavaScript. It uses (some) of the JavaScript syntax, but it doesn't use its standard lib…

Ryan Dahl recently said in a talk that *Deno deploy* and *Cloudflare workers* are just v8 runtimes, they are not Deno nor Node, with all the serverless trend it seems to makes sense, also now that we are going back to SSR (now that react supports it officially) we can combine it with SPA (check remix.run for nested routes, nextjs is also working on that) and lastly hydration, so you can now serve plain html, that will be hydrated when the page loads all the JS, it seems like a win win for all those sites/apps that needs/uses React and the users (you will see the content faster than before, just like good old days).

Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#77

Post by IshKebab »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #61

I think they (as in author and the friend) need some expectation adjustments about how easy it will be to get some random code package published for free on the web to work, regardless of the programming language. In other news I am quite annoyed by the confusing range of hardware and how difficult they make it to bolt a fencepost to a wall: There are masonry bits, high speed steel, different sizes, different anchors…

I disagree. I've never had issues of the magnitude of JS's mess with random free code written in Go or Rust.

I think the reasons for it in JS's case are kind of reasonable though. Just annoying that it's taking so long to sort out.

Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#78

Post by lbriner »

michaelsalim wrote: post #8

Module resolution is quite a mess in JS at the moment. With the steady move to ESM, hopefully things will get better soon. In this transition period, it's painful. Even for those that deal with JS everyday, most don't actually understand the intricacies of CommonJS & ESM.

The problem is that most devs expect agility but many modules live for 10 years+ based on whatever they were based on back in the day with no real desire to rewrite it with the latest package management thingy.

So then we end up with a mix of old and new and the promise of "moving to a bright new world" that just won't happen. As another poster said, since we know that package management is a pain, we should be able to solve all of these issues when we create a new language eco-system, not rush to get the exciting part released with "hello world" and wait for the problems to roll in later.

Interestingly, nuget as a philosophy isn't terrible but there are extreme performance issues and crazy things like not tying a package to a specific feed so if you install it, it asks all of the feeds if it has a copy, most of which will 404. Updates usually take an age but once they are installed, it usually runs OK :-)

Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#79

Post by samwillis »

JS tooling has come a long way in the last couple of years, Vite for example is so much better than everything that came before. Esbuild is incredible and clearly the future of all JS build tools.

The trouble is that to people who are only just outside JS ecosystem it’s not very accessible. If you are a PHP, Python or Ruby developer who cut your teeth in the era of jQuery or earlier (prototype.js & script.aculo.us!) it can be quite difficult to make the transition.

Combining the modern JS environments with platforms like Django, Laravel or Rails often means having to install and setup from scratch a full Node/NPM toolchain in parallel with your backend toolchain. I believe this is some of the reason for such a disconnect between the the “backend” and “frontend” unless you go 100% JS. I think it's pushed a lot of devs who used to think of themselves as "full stack" towards the backend.

I’m trying to fix this with Tetra (https://www.tetraframework.com) for the Django ecosystem, the plan is to eventually bundle a esbuild/postcss/sass/less toolchain along with built in tools for installing JS dependancies so you can completely live within the Python/Django environment. It will manage all the complexities of JS tooling for you.

The vast majority of developers don't want to think about tooling, they just want to build something quickly and get it out there.

Re: Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

#80

Post by whiddershins »

It is so true. I have seen experienced developers pull their hair out for a day or more trying to get a basic build system working, or to import a simple module.

I have been that developer.

I have been that developer, tried to communicate the lessons learned to other developers, and ended up finding out they couldn’t learn from my mistakes and had to reinvent the wheel with many hours of frustration anyway.

I develop in Node and Sveltekit regularly and the chances that on any given day my flow might be crushed by random madness is unacceptably high.

I’m not even sure what I think about it all.

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