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About a year ago we created as an experiment a custom AST-tree with a renderer in React. We finished this part, but never actually finished any view in our app with this, due to other timeconstraints.

This week, our new project manager looked through the usage of the implementation and basically figured it was shit. This part is fine, it was just an experiment.

But then he said that we sgould never use any AST’s ever in our project. I tried to explain that ASTs are a general concept and mentioned that for instance TypeScript uses it. Then he went bat-shit crazy and disallowed the use of typescript. We spent the next two hours explaining that we cannot avoid ASTs and that they are not bad in general.

But we are not allowed to ever implement some similar to an AST. Sometimes, I’m just blown away by the stubbornness combined with ignorance of some people. Either is fine, but not both.

Comments
  • 8
    Sounds like someone you just don't tell anyone anything if at all possible.

    Also sounds like a person who got confused and upset and just wanted people to follow orders and was going to make a point of it even if he cut off his nose.
  • 3
    Holy shit, I guess I can be happy that our PMs do their job, but don't try to do mine. They care WHAT we do and also WHY so that they won't look stupid in front of the customers, but not HOW it's implemented.
  • 1
    Why AST in JS/TS. Shouldn't you be using a high performance programing language with AST?
  • 3
    @h3rp1d3v it really depends. In this case, it was just a view for a generic for that was created and submitted by the user. It was plenty fast enough in react.
  • 1
    @N00bPancakes yeah, we actually have been trying for a while not to tell this person too much, but he is very insistent on being told everything.
  • 1
    @runardev Can't think of use cases for AST in react. Interested to see how AST is used
  • 2
    What the fuck.
  • 3
    Well, you can stop programming since any language is somehow using an AST...
  • 2
    @DevLivesMatter worse. You can stop using computers, since they are AST in Hardware.
  • 1
    Yeah, lets block whole internet access. Its dangerous!
  • 2
    I don't understand this rant. AST is just a data structure. Like e.g. an array. What did he suggest to store this data in instead?
  • 1
    @cprn well, that is sort of my point. They dont know shit, but they just keep insisting on being right just the same.
  • 3
    It's ego. He does not know AST that much so he bans it.
  • 0
    Lulz. Just ignore that donkey. He can't tell whether something is an AST or not anyways.
    Just call them "syntax tree" in the future.
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