42

Grunt, gulp, bower, webpack, rollup, yarn, npm, requirejs, commonjs, browserify, brunch, rollup, parcel, fusebox, babel,
wrappers for bundlers, frameworks on frameworks, then for css, theres scss, sass, less, stylus, compass, and for templates, handlebars, mustache, nunjucks, underscore, ejs, pug, jade, and about five billion other word-salad tools, all with their own CLIs, each in some way building on npm, but with their own non-congruent little syntax, like no one realized they were reinventing the same problems introduced by domain specific languages, most happy to announce "configuration takes a little time, but it's worth it!"

No, it's not. Just stop people. Just stop. You're not doing anyone any favors by creating another lib, all you're doing is tooting your own horn and self promoting. Use what exists and stop creating more shit for new people to learn, to add to the giant clusterfuck that is the 2019 hotmess known as "web development."

You're not special. You're not important. You're lib or tool will be famous for 15 minutes and no one cares what you've made.

If you want to contribute to web development, do us all a favor and contribute to global sanity by kindly deleting your contribution and any plans to contribute new solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Comments
  • 7
    I only have agree. I mean all these tools *do* suck ass. So makes sense for someone to want to make a better one. Just too bad that all web devs appear to be incompetent
  • 4
    God dammit.

    *"your" not "you're"
  • 3
    Finally, a voice of reason.. thank you!
  • 3
  • 6
    @Wisecrack, 90% of what you mentioned it's either garbage or old tools that anyone with common sense already removed from his stack.
    slowly, but frontend world is finally evolving into something more stable and structured

    the problem is that frontend-land is full of ex java-ers (or equivalent) who love to over-engineer and over-configure everything and instead ignore conventions, and even worse, full of wannabes who just watched frontend101 on youtube and consider themself pros.

    ...and i didn't mention web designers, from whom arise another huge part of this big misunderstanding
  • 1
    @thatsnotnice would love to upvote you, but I don't want to destroy that holy number
  • 2
    Nobody needs CSS compilers anyway because if there's CSS in the hundreds of kB, things have already gone completely wrong.
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop Nah we really need Sass
  • 1
    sass was a great solution, then it became a good compromise... but guys, now 2010 is long gone.
    for new projects sass is acceptable if you deploy on premise. if you go cloud these days you want to limit XHR and keep side/lazy loading for additional business logic, not stylesheets

    single JS bundle and goodbye argentina
  • 0
    @thatsnotnice

    I think a huge part of it is that the onboarding process for us newbs is fucked.

    Like you said "old tools", which are standard though? And which are being used, versus "shouldn't be used" and more importantly, why.

    What we really need is

    MOAR FLOW CHARTS UP IN THIS BITCH.

    Everyone going through the process of learning has to repeat the same flow-chart like process of deducing exactly what is current tech, what is stable, and what should be discarded..for every aspect of the stack. Thats not sustainable at the rate of growth web dev is experiencing and it's leading to bottlenecks in labor.
  • 3
    @Wisecrack i understand your point

    basically, I don't care if new devs know or not all the tools: i'm looking for a mindset

    i want someone with real JS literacy (even if we code only in TS), someone who takes no shortcuts, and is able to follow rigorous TDD (and here thinking functional helps a lot). i don't want to see any jquery-like code.
    you know react hooks but not rxJS? you used only grunt when instead we use npm scripts? i couldn't care less. but you need to be able to separate 🍫 from 💩, bearing in mind that we're using a LISP-like language and our delivery scenario is event-driven.

    a developer that shows real understanding of these aspects is a real frontend developer to me
    but they're rare and typically, legitimately very picky as most of the times companies don't consider client-side programming a first-class citizen in their stack
  • 0
    @Wisecrack you mentioned a bunch of stuff in the first post... give them a try and then figure out how contextualise them with the big techs that we cannot avoid these days (like angular, functional flavours of react, various server side rendering wrappers etc.)

    for example you deliver an isomorphic react app, let's say Next.JS for SaaS product in a serverless env.
    if you use grunt because you like it, fine, it's not the end of the world (still it's an extra dep)
    but if you use grunt because you **need it**, well... i already know enough about your project to call it garbage.

    that's what i meant a few posts up.
    finally we're having emerging conventions. follow them, and everything stays dry and simple
  • 1
    Tbh I just don't care anymore, I click New project, select vue-cli and almost never have to touch any configuration, even when I add pug and stylus they work out of the box(I guess thanks to someone who took the time to configure everything correctly). Or even better I just make a new Nuxt project and I never see any configuration because someone already did it for me... but it's there if I really need it (which I did just like two weeks ago when I was trying to approach Nuxt in a Vue-specific way and did not know there was a better but Nuxt-specific way of doing it). I always just get my way with Vue.js/Nuxt.js vs anything else because I can back up my claims with facts, screenshots and pretty graphs... so I don't care about anything else but the frameworks, preprocessors and so on that I use.
  • 2
    @Wisecrack One big reason is that most web devs are just full of shit. Easy to tell by looking at average websites.

    They go banzai with half a meg of JS on pages that don't even fucking warrant the PRESENCE of JS to begin with. Next, they fling around hundreds of kB in CSS-apeshit because their markup is totally bollocks, and that's because they don't even understand the fucking BASICS of their trade, which would be HTML.

    And then there are those wannabe-clever dumbasses who still don't understand shit, but have enough skills to do serious damage, resulting in something like WorsePress.

    Really, as witnessed by the average website, 90% of current web development is total and utter bullshit.

    Oh yeah it's "easier", they claim. As if!
  • 2
    @thatsnotnice

    "finally we're having emerging conventions"

    Exactly, and some of us want to know what those conventions are, instead of simply telling us "1. learn grunt. 2. drop grunt. 3. use something else."

    We can optimize that step right out of existence by you writing "don't use grunt. use xyz. Grunts outdated. Xyz is convention."
  • 1
    Preach!
  • 2
    ANSI C FTW.
  • 2
    @OneOfSimpleMind

    What NPM module is that? (jk)
Add Comment