Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

Wi-Fights

Just one bit off.

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

Company: "We'd like to use SQL Server Enterprise" MS: "That'll be a quarter million dollars + $20K/month" Company: "Ok!" ... Company: "We'd like to use Babel" Babel: "Ok! npm i babel --save" Company: "Cool" Babel: "Would you like to help contribute financially?" Company: "lol no"

I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF BUSINESS MOTHERFUCKERS USING TECHNICAL FUCKING BUZZWORDS LIKE THEY KNOW SHIT ABOUT TECH! THEY TRY TO BE FUCKING SMARTASSES AND ARGUE WITH DEVELOPERS LIKE GOD KNOWS WHY THIS FUCKING DOUCHE IS NOT THROWN IN /dev/null YET!

Ugh. He try to sound smart and argued with a unity game developer why the dev is not using "react" and "redux" in his game, purely because "since its the hype in 2016"... I was like really nigga?? FOR FUCKS SAKE Do some research before you say! Then he argued with a senior full-stack web developer on why they're using ES6 and not ES7, purely because he heard that ES7 is newer. When we try to explain we're not using decorator syntaxes since we use pure functions in our codebase, or how we haven't installed any ES7 babel plugins to transpile our code, he kept saying ES7 is newer and cooler and we must use it somehow... More to rant but i am fucking tired right now...

How to make someone feel helpless.

!rant

I built a decently large project at work, and everything works perfectly. It's beautiful, it's fast, it's light, it's organized and clean, and deploying is a breeze. I'm very proud of it.

The biggest reason, though, is that it uses exclusively technology I had never touched before:
• React
• Redux
• ES6/Babel
• Webpack
• Express.js
• Material Design
• Apple lappy (I'm a linux girl)

I was completely new to all of these, including my dev machine. Every single aspect of the project was outside my skillet.

But it went from my first experimental `import React from 'react'` to production-ready in three weeks. I'm really proud 😊

Me: I'm building for 32 bit.
Me: But I feel like I should be building for 64 bit.
Me: But not everyone has a 64 bit OS.
Me: But who the fuck doesn't?
Jerry: The people who can't run our game.

I just hate npm dependencies.

If you want to write a small website with npm dependencies (some frontend deps like Bootstrap and some development deps like gulp or babel) you will have more npm dependencies in your project than own code. It is ridiculous, how some lazy developers just add dependencies to their projects, without evaluating their dependencies. The source code of one of my projects is around 4MB (without any dependencies). If you then run yarn as required, it grows to around 80MB (where 73MB are node_modules).

This is just terrible.

I rant about this, as I made the mistake to upload my node_modules directories when restoring a backup of my server. Worst idea one could ever have.

Just noticed devrant on the babel page

Me: Well, it's time to make a new app!
* opens up VS Code *
* opens folder selection dialog *
* creates a new folder called "notes app" *
* yarn inits that folder *
* installs react and react-dom *
* installs webpack, webpack-cli, babel-core, babel-loader, babel-preset-env, babel-preset-react, style-loader, css-loader, file-loader, html-webpack-plugin and clean-webpack-plugin as a dev dependency (install is pending) *
* copies a webpack config from some other project *
* creates a babelrc file *
* copies a yarn script called "build:dev" which would launch webpack *
* dev dependencies installed *
* tries to save *
* vscode doesn't save because files differ *
* tries to copy dev dependencies *
* fail *
* tries again *
* saves *
* writes bare-bones index.jsx *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
* writes bare-bones App.jsx which is a react component but it's an entire app *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
-- trim --
* walks out of his room to his mom's room where's sbc is located *
* grandma plays solitare on laptop *
* i ask grandma for a laptop *
* grandma gives me laptop *
* glues all components into App.jsx *
* yarn start:dev (magic of webpack-dev-server) *
* opens localhost:8080 in firefox *
* searches how to update a component prop *
* nothing found *
* registers on devrant and verifies his email *
* writes this rant *

That moment when you find yourself seriously arguing with your rubber duck about which approach to implement...

Hello, I just want to let you know I'm working on a 15 year old product and it is currently in production.

It uses Angular.js and one of the earliest versions of React.js. I cannot use ES6, we don't have Babel, no JSX syntax, no CSS preprocessor. No webpack.

I must support browser since IE6 with an ES3 syntax. (luckily I got some some polyfills for an ES5 syntax)

When I build a component I have to call React.createClass and React.createElement.

The render() function is basically a nested pile of React.createElement.

There is no documentation for this product, no tests, no anything.

I had to reverse engineer it in order to understand how it works.

The code base uses mixed programming styles and naming conventions, plus thousands of little js files.

Oh and obviously no hot reload, every time I make a change I have to restart everything.

Please, send help.
I'm in danger.

Sincerely,
An underpaid developer

....
I'm not crying, you are crying...

You know what?
Fuck Webpack and Babel, too.
They're way too complicated and finicky to set up.

I want to write a simple library, not a freaking research paper.

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.

A moment of silence for the javascript devs downloading a 13MB of this guy along with their babel transpiler.

When you try install babel-node instead babel-cli and got sweet message from the developer,, 😇

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Programmer's prayer

Modern web frontend is giving me a huge headache...

Gazillion frameworks, css preprocessors, transpilers, task runners, webpack, state management, templating, Rxjs, vector graphics,async,promises, es6,es7,babel,uglifying,minifying,beautifying,modules,dependecy injection....

All this for programming apps that happen to run inside browsers on a protocol which was designed to display simple text pages...

This is insanity. It cannot go on like this for long. I pray for webasm and elm to rescue me from this chaos.

I work now as a fullstack dev as my first job but my next job is definitely going to be backend/native stuff for desktop or mobile. It seems those areas are much less crazy.

I've been lurking for a while but I had it up to here with these goddamned "js sucks" posts.

I'm not gonna deny js has severe design problems,
or that chromium is a motherfucking vampire
or that it's a goddamn pain in the ass to understand how to babel webpack + plugins correctly

that is all true.

the problem is that it's just a lazy damn circlejerk at this point where no learning is gained, with no outlook on any possible solution of these problems, let alone ANY type of actual collaboration to help the situation.

sometimes people don't even care to specify what is specifically wrong with js. It's just "js sucks" and that's it, farm ++.

slack is a ram hog, yes, yes, we know... WE KNOW.
every 5 days someone has to remind that!

is there any solution? why is it a ram hog? is electron the problem, or is the slack source code doing weird shit?
are there any lightweight alternatives to electron?

That's actual good conversation, but no, apparently it's impossible to drop the snarky tone for 2 seconds.

I think it's fine to point out defficiencies in applications, but it's not ok to shitpost on and on.

I would very ok with someone shitcomplaining about js is if they were doing something about it.

I'm still ok with people letting of some steam, I'm fine with people expressing frustration from direct work experience with js. I'm not ok with people and their ignorance and snarky comments and non helpfulness while comfortably laughing from their own camp of totally unrelated technologies.

Hearing sysadmins or people that code exclusively in c shit on js makes me feel my insides twirl.

Imagine I didn't do shit for linux, but I went around forums pointing out the defficiencies, like the lack of standards, and saying that mac is way better.

Or I if yapped on and on about openvpn and having an obscure as fuck api, meanwhile not doing a single fucking thing about it, or not even using it in a day to day basis.

do you hate slack's ram usage? me too and js isn't going anywhere in the next 5 years, so either do something or provide smart conversation, diagnosis of the problem or possible alternstives/solutions, otherwise stfu

I come from PHP and have been using jQuery as a crutch for years. I've dabbled in Node and obviously writing some vanilla JS is unavoidable, but now I'm starting to use ES6 with Babel and VueJS and the more I dig in, the more I hate javascript. Everything is an object (null, array), there seems to be a few gotchas with math (including the one pictured), nothing is strongly typed but types are very important (for instance, you can't loop an object and an array using the same code), and there are a lot of inconsistencies/functions missing. ucwords for instance. Why doesn't that exist? typeof only returns object, but Array.isArray and Object.isObject work fine. I'm going to give typescript a go soon and cross my fingers.

Steps to writing Javascript in 2018:
1. mkdir and touch necessary files.
2. install and configure babel.
35. Start configuring webpack.
900. open app.js

Hmm our bundle js is already 1.35Mb maybe I should do something with that.

... Insert 2 hours of frantic webpack magic + babel-preset tweeking, tree-shake code optimization ...

- npm run build
- bundle.js => 1.37Mb

Great Success! I'm going to take a lunch...

*Evil laugh*

Babel-preset-php

Why I can't just get this fucking Webpack working?

😡😠😡😠😡😠😡😠😡😠

Fucking es2015! Fucking Babel! Fucking JavaScript!

...No. Sry, JavaScript. I actually love you.

While I'm still struggling with Webpack and Babel. There's one light in the end of this abyss. Dear @AlexDeLarge is reaching out and helps me with all his experience. devRant, what a wonderful place.

This whole github thing is only yet again revealing, how many package maintainers are a bunch of instable psychopaths and should have somebody else manage the keys

be it one guy deleting all shit from npm and breaking worldwide babel installs or now raging toddlers deleting their repos with no actual readme notice or atleast placeholder repo and telling others to do the same

jesus fucking christ, how can the same person have developed such intricate package and then be an absolute manbaby throwing shit at strangers

I don't have a rubber ducky to explain my code to, so I'll just use this little llama.

Does anyone feel overwhelmed by all the new technologies? It's like every developer nowadays code in JS, and knows ES6, React, webpack, babel by heart. I have been working in Java for less than a decade and sometimes feel like I can't catch up. Even in Java ecosystem there is now Scala, Groovy, Gradle, Kotlin... Not to mention other languages like Python, Swift... How do you guys have time to pick up everything?? 😖

Am I the only one who couldn't care less how my website looks on Internet Explorer? If you visit my website, you'd better damn well not be using Internet Explorer.

Fucking React Scripts, "yOu hAvE mUlTiPlE VErSiOnS oF bAbEL-JeSt, Use nPm Ls Jest To TrACk It Down"

Ok you dumb fucks:

npm ls babel-jest
react-typescript@1.0.0 /Users/chris/Downloads/8sleu4
└─┬ react-scripts@4.0.3
├── babel-jest@26.6.3
└─┬ jest-circus@26.6.0
└─┬ jest-runner@26.6.3
└─┬ jest-config@26.6.3
└── babel-jest@26.6.3

OH LOOK THEY ARE BOTH IDENTICALLY 26.6.3 STOP BUILDING AN OPINIONATED PILE OF GARBAGE IN YOUR COCONUT TREE FUCKED UP FALSE PARADISE YOU CALL SILICON VALLEY!!!!!!! I'VE NEVER SEEN SUCH A BUNCH OF GARBAGE!!!! I'D PREFER A TOOL WRITTEN BY KINDERGARTNERS IN CRAYON!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

EVERY

SINGLE

TIME

REACT SCRIPTS

BREAKS

Before I used to programming C++, but now I'm programming JavaScript, so Babel transpiling still counts? And SASS compiling?

That pretty much sums it up.

TIL What the rubber ducky method is.

If you didn't think NodeJS dependency hell was that bad, you should try sequentially parsing a graph that's stored as an array of nodes and their references, where processing of said nodes forces you to use some async functions that depend on other async functions.

What should have been 20 lines of code written in 30 minutes has turned into 3 hours of horror, reading about babel, realizing that it's just adding more problems without solving one, assessing the effort of modification of async libraries to include sync methods as well, trying out asyncwait, async, and everything else there is, trying to rethink the recursive algorithm, rewriting it several times, cursing and hating myself for not choosing to use Python or .NET Core, screaming senselessly at my wife in a language as familiar to her as Klingon, crying in the bathroom, re-assessing my life choices, thinking whether it was a mistake to dedicate 10 years to this career, maybe I'm just not cut out for it since I can't handle this simple task, watching noose tying tutorials on youtube, thinking about my naked empty RPI that won't connect to the server any time soon.

Seriously. Why is it SO BAD?! Or is it just me?

-> Contribute to Zulip's mobile app on github.

-> Contribute to babel.

-> Build 5 npm packages.

-> Dive into Haskell.

-> Have 100,000 ++s on devRant😁

-> Make a private project I built on github public.(still thinking about it).

I've come up with my fair share of dev pickup lines over time. I'm particularly proud of this one.

Webpack and Babel make me want to kill myself. Takes longer to set a project up than it does to write the damn thing.

Jest addin for vscode:
The Good
- I love how it's running all the time testing my code
The Bad
- Doesn't show line numbers where the problems are (may be a babel/promises issue perhaps)
- Doesnt have coloured text (normal jest runner does)
- I can't get debugging working (I'm sure I will eventually)

/rantover

I fucking hate Babel

I can do time travel 😁😁😁

Had an interesting application for a web / fs position the other day. Some guy in his 40s sent a CV, along with a bunch of 5+ years old reference letters (recommending him for things like PHP 5.3 and ExtJs 4). A bit outdated but okay.

And then, he put in a list of NPM packages he used. Not just relevant frameworks like Angular & React, or tools like Webpack and Babel. No. A list. Of. NPM. Packages. There were things like UUID there, which is literary a single function!

Ok, just built my first hello wold using react and after installing node babel react etc... The resulting folder is 51.7mb big. Makes me wonder what am I doing with my life why should I do this. what's the fucking point of it all.
Don't get me wrong I like react and I think it's really cool, but what is all this going to achieve at the end "build a website to sell rubber poop" like wtf... some company wants to sell shit and some monkey with an MBA is going to set the deadline and add Features. No one understands the shit we go through no one cares and we just build websites and Android apps... maybe there is no point here maybe there is nothing.
I remember when coding was fun now it's just building highly responsive web/Mobile based IT solutions to clients who wouldn't know a good website if it fucked them in the ass

The command line is so powerful

My Back-End dev suggest me to switch NodeJS to NodeJS+VUEJS&BABEL and told me that I would like it because it's fast even when I do the Front-End....

I regret it...

So now you want the old version? Now you want GIT? Now you want a branching model with CI? 1 year into the project?
FML

I hate PHP but those videos at Laracast are amazing and helped me learn Vue, and basic Webpack with Babel. Thinking about watching their PHP videos, but I'm not a web dev and not planning to, any advise? Though I do write websites for my self only

Babel

Looking at transpilers is humbling

Heureka! I made it work! I made it work!

After two weeks of trying shit and fixing without any clue what the fucking problem is, I finaly made it work.

Somehow Atom had a problem finding the correct paths on my Windows 10 machine. After I retried it on the Windows Console it perfectly worked.

Some solutions are simple. Some problems are stupid!

All thanks goes to @AlexDeLarge for writting awesome comments and understanding Webpack so damn well.

Why I try to ALWAYS use semicolons in JS:

In short, weird shit happens sometimes

An example:

So I'm doing a small project for freeCodeCamp, working with the Twitch API. I decided to make an array on the fly to append a few elements to a documentFrag in order after setting all my props. Forgot a semicolon. Apparently, Babel transpiles this:

info.innerHTML = (``)
[span, caret, info].forEach(elm => frag.appendChild(elm));

to this if you omit the semicolon:
info.innerHTML = ' '[(span, caret, info)]

this is why you should avoid relying on ASI, you're going to have to remember them in other languages out there, so for your own sanity, might as well get used to them. Just thought I'd share--who knows, might help a JS newb out there somewhere.

Donate now!

One thing JS does great is that everything from the server to the gui to the (extremely flexible) build system is 100% platform independent with very few platform specific bugs. And that's a big deal when a basic setup is 1200 packages from 650+ semi-coordinated people.

Oh my god, I'm basically at the verge of self-destruction! I've been trying all day to set up a simple Node server with react, but it's never that easy, is it? You need Babel to transpile ES6 + JSX to ES5, and then you need Webpack for god knows what reasons, and there are so man configuration files and options, and there are 1000 tutorials with 1001 ways to do something. I've created probably 20 new project because when I complete a tutorial and try to do something on my own, all hell is loose and I get some cryptic error message and am unable to ever get it to work. Holy cow, I need a drink... Am I just a retard? Greetings from Norway, by the way!

I am a Technical Lead in the department in my company that writes code for our clients that have money but doesn't have the technical expertise to handle the complexities of our own software.

Part of my tasks involve taking care of a few projects written by employees that have left after using third-party tools rather than using our own software. No one else in this department knows these third-party tools, they only know our own, and my *still limited* web development experience means I get dumped these things in my lap.

And I'm SO pissed at these projects and their authors and the manager that let these ex-employees write these things. There is this one project that was managed by two different "developers" (I don't know they deserve this title) at two different times, and it is so riddled with different technologies it makes me want to throw up almost daily.

Don't believe me? Here is a complete list of the dependencies listed in the package.json of this project: babel-polyfill, body-parser, cookie-parser, debug, edge, edge-sql, excel-to-json, exceljs, express, html-inline, jade, morgan, mssql, mysql, pug, ramda, request, rotating-file-stream, serve-favicon, webpack, xlsx, xml2js

What this doesn't even show, is that one part of this project (literally one page) is made using react, react-dom, react-redux, and jade. The other part (again literally one page) is made using Angular and Pug. In case you missed it while picking up your jaw, there's also mssql, mysql, edge and edge-sql. excel-to-json, exceljs, xlsx.

Oh you want *more* juicy details? This project takes the entire data object used by the front-end, stringifies it into JSON, and shoves it into the database *as a single field*. And instead of doing WHERE clauses in the SQL queries, it grabs the entire table, loops, parses the json, and does a condition on it. If even one of those JSON entries gets corrupted, the entire solution breaks because these "developers" don't know what try/catch is.

The client asked for a very simple change in their app, which was to add a button that queries the back-end for a URL, shows it in a modal dialog, after which a button is clicked to verify the link by doing a second query to the back-end before modifying a couple of fields in the page.

This. Took. Me. Two. Months*. Save me. Please, save me.

*between constant context switches between this and other projects that were continuously failing because of their mistakes.

My first rant. Woohoo!

Honestly I do the whole shebang ussualy depending on what the needs are from network to servers to coding because for some reason nobody has any technical experience where I work.
I just started app development for a gamedev startup and I am in sheer awe of the amount of transpiling/compiling etc that needs to be done for an multiplatform app for iOS and android with js(x)/typescript, html, css.

I remember when I could just write some spaghetti code to make it working by following a couple of tutorials. Then refractoring and testing it for a couple of hours and be done with it. push it into production.

Now I am lost having to learn OOP, functional programming, reactjs, react native, express, webpack, mongodb, babel, and the list goes on and on...
Why not just make a new backend that does all of that in another language which supports all of that.

I have no formal education in programming/coding and the last time I learned JS it was just some if else, switches and simple dom manipulation.

I just want to get to coding a freakin' game but I have to learn JSX for the front and typescript on the backend.

I am this close to going back to ye ol' lamp stack and quitting this job. 😥

JavaScript dev in 2016:

Babel and webpack kicked my ass today. fuck you babel, and fuck u too webpack. neither one of u fucks is making my life any better at the moment. things were moving along, now my app just looks like this. something in this transpile garbage. I'm not missing '>' . it's just not transpiling correctly I think.

How would you go about writing ES6 in your node applications? I'm using nodemon together with babel-core/register and then using a shell script on my server to build it.

Trying to learn Angular and reactjs, reading up the tutorial or documentation...

Why the hell are there ten million more shit I need to look at first? (such as rxjs, Babel, webpack... and whatever the fuck they are)

Now am I supposed to master those ten million tools/libraries before I can proceed?

Of course there is no ten million but mentally it's no difference. I'm just fed up with this.

Theres so many motherfucking command line utilities in web development that I'm surprised there isn't a 128 megabyte NPM install for a leftpad CLI.

God damn people who develop tooling for web development are some navel gazing cunts.
"How can I feel more self important? Lets put a CLI in front of this web bundler!"

Dumbasses.

What happened to the days of purity? Of cleanliness? Of kosher compliant web development, where all you had to do was include a script tag?

Gone are those days. Welcome to Babel(on)!
I put a CLI in your CLI so you can masturbate while you masturbate!

I haven't done any front end stuff in a long time (last time was before jQuery was popular), and since I had some free time lately I decided to check out React and see what it's all about. Turns out that first I had to go trough one week of reading about node.js, npm, jsx, es6/es2015, babel, webpack (and probably something else), but I finally got to React. So far I had no problems with any of this but I have no fucking idea how most of this stuff works behind the curtains and I'm scared.

A dev in the team just found out about JavaScript promises. Now he is putting them everywhere but never handling errors, so it's impossible to tell where the app is actually failing because the error points to the Babel polyfill and the stack trace is not long enough.

Translation resources :

DeepL
Babel fish
Bing translate
Google translate

I want to use Babel or Typescript for the first time. Because as I read it is the way to go, when compressing JavaScript and make it browser compatible. If that's false, please correct me.

There's a question I've got about this. Right now I am using a PHP router file dealing with requests and selecting the right .js file and compresses it. So I can write like modular JavaScript functions and include them when needed.

My question is, what do I have to change in my setup to switch to the mentioned technologies?

Worst architecture: the stack compiler I wrote. I basically just made my own shitty webpack.

The idea was simple: Babel to minified JS, Scss to minified CSS, and HTML to minified HTML. Made in Node JS, of course. (perhaps that’s where I went wrong!)

The thing works... and I use it... but boy is it bad. It even broke on my current project (which is for a client so...) and I’m having to work around my own god damn code.

I really need to revisit it and redo it.

I am a fresher in web development. I have already learnt to use nodejs, react, angular, vanilla js and made many projects. Majority of the work I feel is just CRUD based, sure there are some exciting things but they are only of a small percentage.

All that innovation HAPPENING is just glorified way of making a CRUD APP ONLY.
Oh mvc worked great on server side let's bring it to client side
OH mvc is such a mess, who thought about doing this.
Oh react redux is so revolutionary let's remake our app using it,,
Oh es6 fuck yeah, Babel, webpack sure, now my crud app is super performant.
Oh graphql, motherfucking cutting edge CRUD APP......

I need to know what's next, is there any breaking of this cycle

I fucking hate webpack, babel plugins, loaders, presets and yarn workspaces and lerna monorepos.

Fucking stuck for days on not being able to run a project, tried a lot of github issues solutions. Yes I did read the docs and articles.

So I created my first Babel plugin today.
I think I'm hooked. This stuff is really cool, kind of opens a whole new world for you ☺️

Anyone else notice? The stress ball isn't on the store anymore.

Judge me all you want,
I don't think JavaScript is a good programming language and it should be improved in newer versions. Babel seems promising but still.......

Gulp makes more sense to me than Webpack. I chose it. Please don't hate me.

I spent half of the day trying to make the Grunt script of my node project which uses ECMAscript 6 (Harmony) and make compatible with Uglify-JS by using Babel... Then I found there was a branch of Uglify-JS for Harmony and I only had to update my dependency which took me 2min -_-

Developing front-ends used to be about translating a business use case to an interface. Now I spend days and weeks getting tooling to integrate properly: webpack, babel, React, Vue, SSR, Nuxt, NPM packages, build & CI pipelines, storybooks, and resolving incompatibilities. It's become such a grind I haven't had a single satisfying, productive workday since 4 months.

The web dev front-end world is insane!!

webpack, babel, node, npm, sass, css, postcss, javascript, cypress etc etc.

It should be easier and easier to build web apps NOT harder and harder for each year!

Omg I loath path separators. Been working on windows most of the time (bought a surface pro for some reason) and my colleagues work on Linux. We just do standard web dev stuff nothing special but. I started having issues with my windows build getting weird function.prototype.bind.apply is not a constructor issue. Which is valid because apparently my colleagues started using the fat arrow function everywhere and on places where not needed.......

But on Linux they never had an issue because babel fixed it to the old function during the transpileee. So why the fuck am I getting this problem. After some tedious debugging and asking my colleagues. (colleagues only responded with just use Linux) I found the the issue to lie in the webpack loader for the Javascript in which the path regex used a single / :(. So I changed that to a group to be / or // and bam the whole bloody project works on windows now.

....... My colleagues still don't understand that they over use the fat arrow in the wrong places unfortunately

So for the past day I've been obsessed with adding compression into my build pipeline for web dev, I've implemented html minify, babel JS minify, gzip and made the server specify content length to prevent chunking and shave off a few unused bytes. Is there anything else anyone can think of to get even more gains? Sofar my project went from 1.33mb to 180kb transferred. It's a huge win, just wondering if I can push it further somehow?

So my Algebra 2 teacher won't give students credit without showing work (You can literally make a 600/600 on the final with writing a thing down). I've decided that I'm going to create a program for everything that she assigns me, so that if she asks for the work, I can show her the source code.

So, let's version control MySQL. Any ideas?

Looking at vacancies and the JS build tools asked (Babel, Gulp) and then visiting their websites I notice that I don't understand what they are going on about.

"Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines."

What the actual corpo fuck?

The "get started" page expects you already know npm, typescript, and when you look at their pages, well... Where does the circlejerk end and the actual Javascript start?

I've been out of the corporate loop for a few years, seems it's all about build tools these days. I need to get out of this industry pronto.

Anyone know how to go about unit testing an application that is made up of:
- Electron
- Node
- React
- Typescript

(React using Typescript of course).

Electron has its own framework (Spectron), people seem to use Mocha with Node, React has its own tools like React testing library (and testing UI components will probably end me) and Typescript seems to play best with Jest - but a special Typescript flavour of Jest called ts-jest is preferable because the only other option is having Babel and its Typescript support that doesn't type check.

I want to beg for the sweet release of death.

When you don't quite know what a dongle is but you decide to misinform 150+ million users anyway

I feel like IE is an example of a deep rooted demon beast that spawns fucktarded bloat transpilers like BABEL.
When companies try to invent their own wheels, or do their own thing is when the pits of developer hell start to spawn such fucking convoluted fucktarded bullshit.

Abstract to Design:
I'm trying to think of a world where things are standardized, as boring as it sounds... Imagine if companies weren't so fucktarded with greedy smoke and mirrors, and they all contributed to making a single product standardized and workable, and improve on that product... Like a physics "Standard model" but for each product invented.

But no... here we are... 20 million ways to accomplish one similar task, with 20 million different designs, with majority adhering to their own flaws... or planned obsolecence... 10 million booby traps of consumer remorse.

Why do we do this as a society just to make some bastard company's profit margin go up, so they can keep competing in the "free market" of fuck all fuckery?

I get it.. yea... innovation... sure..
but sometimes innovation is just a means to and end of sanity, especially when they are proprietary, and especially when that proprietary shit turns to, well... shit!

In a perfect world, things will be designed open-sourced, compatible, and improved upon without "breaking" changes... but this is virtually impossible without standardization of the VERY fundamental components. But then those components can be improved, and might be smaller/lighter/more efficient by design, and simply wont work with the old versions without drastic "TRANSPILATION"

I suppose this is the way it is always going to be... Neverending stream of design "improvements". I suppose being a developer in todays world is a bittersweet existence... unless you're just trying to make ends meet... in that case. I think I might be in hell.

Take a look at web-dev today with all the "improvements" ... it's literally turned into a jungle of FUCK MY LIFE. A giant dick waiving contest with all these dicks colliding against each other in cluster fuck bombardment.

God help us all.... and now back to coding.

That moment after you have modified a lot of files so that the linter doesn't throw any errors... Only to realize you were missing the FUCKING BABEL CONFIGURATION FILE AND AFTER YOU ADD IT EVERYTHING WORKS JUST FUCKING FINE WITHOUT MODIFYING ALL THOSE EXTRA FILES!

FUUUUCK

Tried using a new language...
Syntax was really nice to work with, no additional bloat like webpack/babel required either...
And then I hit the roadblock...
they enforce *hardtabs* with no option to change to spaces D:

for crying out loud D:

In the past 3 months I worked on a new frontend project at work using "new things" like vue.js and webpack including Babel polyfills on production for the first time. Now the project is almost done an I've been sent on to other tasks on our older projects to help follow the deadline at these projects.

It is a hard cut to switch my head back to the old legacy code after this long time only working with the new stuff and technologies. I feel much less productive at the moment, because I know how much time I could safe if I just could use the new technologies. But there is now way around this. Finally I now have to maintain Symfony 1.2 and jQuery again instead of building new awesome stuff in this exiting new technologies.

I don’t know about you but I use backticks for every string in js. I want to know that I can always use quotes and apostrophes and backticks ensure this. Also they allow templates and Babel got me covered when it comes to old browsers.

I don’t see the reason why should I use something but backticks in 2020

Again,
` — kiki
“, ‘ — boubas

New employee joining the company next week. Where should she start on JS?

New employee is joining the company I work for next week, and I have the responsibility to teach, train and give her tasks. It is my first time training someone so I really have no idea how to do this. :P

She knows a little bit of Vanilla JS. Our projects are built with AngularJS (v1) with ES6, Webpack & Babel, ReactJS & jQuery. I want to put her on the project using AngularJS.

What order of learning do you recommend? VanillaJS, AngularJS & ES6? AngularJS & ES6? Or if you have any other suggestion, feel free to let me know.

Thank You.

Babels

I’m so sorry if this is the place for questions. I’m terrified of stack overflow and have been searching for a week for a solution and can’t find one. This is for React.js people.

I was tasked to create a webpage with react. The limitation is, they did not wanna adopt the node.js dependency. I said ok, I’ll figure it out. You can inject react, material UI, and babel with script tags in HTML, then put ur lil components in it. I did that and it works beautifully.

However, now I have to write tests for this. I think it’s actually impossible without a way to render React, so I have to use the browser, or node, right? I convinced my boss to allow me to use a node.js container just for testing, which I thought would make my life easier.

I don’t know how to render this thing with node. It’s just an HTML file that pulls react via script tags, and idk how to serve html with node. Additionally, none of the React testing libraries seem to support testing a system that wasn’t designed to be served with node, at least not easily. My gut tells me that the complication with how things are imported contributes at least a little to this (dependencies pulled via script tags in the HTML file and made available to react through global const variables).

I could be wrong about any of this — im fairly new. But how tf do I go about testing these react components? For reference, if you go to Reacts docs, there’s a section called “add react to a page in one minute” that’s pretty much what I did.

I love my language, I love my highlighter, but most of all I love my transpiler ❤️

You know you are screwed when you get a webpack error like "Module build failed" Babel cannot find module @babel-plugin-some-nonesense" & gyp module build failed because of fucked C++ node versions, go find the right node for you & you better start the project webpack config and .babelrc from scratch because you ain't getting anywhere with these errors.

Writing jest test cases for a MongoDB server app.

I noticed, inside the testEnvironment file, it uses ‘require’ instead of ‘import’.
I changed it to ‘import’...🤔
Somehow it pops out syntaxErrors.🤦‍♂️

In my actual .test.js file, I use import all the time, never had any issue.

The Babel transform and babel-jest are also in the right place.

Anyone know why?

started out with react.....its been a fucking week hopping from documentation to youtube to udemy, edx, pluralsight, blogs and what not..... All hit me at once: babel, webpack, ecmascript, fuckin hell.... Cant even set up my machine on my own without any boilerplate to just start working with a fucking framework ..... Uughhh!! Finally found a setup guide on scotch.io.... Followed the steps using yarn(as thats what the tutorial creater used). Worked flawlessly. Tried to imitate using npm, doesn't work.... Why? Fucking piece of crap framework... Steep learning curve..... Cool logo tho.

Well this changes with time and types of projects but for now my favourite is atom especially with Babel for writing JSX for React

Another part of messy network gone.

Caching fucked me hard....

Isn't it just lovely that nowadays you need to nearly wipe a machine to get it from claiming stale data....

And thanks to DNS, HAProxy -/ service names / ... I think I know now why the curse of babel is so powerful.

When you have to think for 2 mins to make sure you've set the zone's right, cause otherwise you need to ProxyJump with SSH through more tunnels than imaginable (VPN/HO) to fix possible caching on several DNS servers.... You'll realize that it's russian roulette with too much bullets. :(

And If a monitoring service asks another monitoring service for status information which asks the first monitoring service which then asks the second monitoring cause you were too late...

You'll get very funky monitoring statistics.

Too slow, had to nuke it (mismatched a DNS name, the second monitoring service should have been a service node).

I think I've had more near death scenarios in the last 2 weeks than I like.

Hopefully I'll never have to do that again.

(Splitting and reordering a few dozen VLANs, assigning proper DNS names, loadbalancer migration....)

So you need babel to run es6+ on node js because node js can't handle es6 yet. 🤔
Why can't the node guys work with the babel guys to integrate babel with node and save me the extra stress of having to figure out if my es6 code is not working because of a syntax error or because I didn't transpile properly🤷‍♂️

When you are leading in updating a product to the latest version of a framework, what allows the integration of webpack into it, and so also allows the usage of babel, what allows the usage of ES6 syntax.

And now everyone in the company started calling the "new javascript codes" a part of the framework, even though i explained multiple times how it works.

So today I learnt that babel/runtime-corejs2 is a lib which makes babel more optimised by refactoring most of its function calls. So I need to import a library..... to gain more performance out of an existing library.... I mean you could literally refactor babel instead of asking people to import another package in your project 🤦‍♂️

Fucking jQuery in Polymer 0.5.

When polymer 0.5 was released, things seemed incredibly easy at first, but when you need to do some complex things, the abstraction layer provided by web components are not of much help. Babel wasn't there too, so I ended up using scope hacks to access event listeners (var self = this). Worse, I have to use jQuery because many of things are downright tedious or fucked up back then, including myself.

Now, React is here; No jQuery, no hacks, no web component polyfills, no unsolvable perf bugs, no scope hacks, no 10sec loading time, no regrets.

The state of the art of polyfilling is emberassing.

Working. Finding a bug. Quick-fix. New bug. New bug. New bug. Spending 1 hour looking for Quick easy solution. Getting distracted with a more complicated solution. Spending 1 hour researching. Back to problem, one more hour bruteforcing the problem. Finding it was just about a configuration problem. Fix in 5 minutes. Repeat everyday.

When I'm installing React, I see that I already have babel but reactjs.org tells me to install babel, can you explain me why please ?

Behold! This is the first time in my career when Jest and unit testing in general actually helped me 😂

Spent two days moving from a fucking slow piece of crap called Gatsby to Vite, trying to comprehend the difference between TS aliases, Babel aliases and Linaria aliases. Found an answer inside a totally unrelated issue explaining Jest stuff, good job on documentation, Linaria!

Vite is fast. Crazy fast. Forget about Webpack, Parcel and things alike — Vite doesn't even need to bundle JS.

Gatsby was slow to the point of my computer's audio glitching, I'm not even talking about the OS interface lags.

Vite is fast to the point that I don't actually need a new MacBook.

firstly, does anyone know of an online telegram or whatsapp group where i can ask silly stuff regarding web dev and get immediate answers, just like it is here?

secondly i am trying to learn js and there are just too many related terms that are messing with my brain:
"some features are supported ines5/es6/es15/es16/es17 , some are supported in chrome's v8/chakra/spidermonkey/android browser , some features are only supported in "serverside" and blocked in all browsers thanks to browser's vm environment; babel can't read this code, some features are provided only by node js..."
WHAT THE MESS IS THIS?

All i am trying to do is to write code that would make a website visible to everyone. if by specific browser , i want to target, chrome and its subsidaries and android chrome/other android browsers .
for other browsers am willing to make external converters later but don't want to change my code by 1 bit. And from what i know, each browser (at least the browsers am thinking of supporting) has the complete JS compilers already built in

can i or can i not built a complete functional website with those things?

and finally my main question : how to make custom exceptions in vanilla js? i saw this answer on stack overflow:
===================
function InvalidArgumentException(message) {
this.message = message;
// Use V8's native method if available, otherwise fallback
if ("captureStackTrace" in Error)
Error.captureStackTrace(this, InvalidArgumentException);
else
this.stack = (new Error()).stack;
}

InvalidArgumentException.prototype = Object.create(Error.prototype);
InvalidArgumentException.prototype.name = "InvalidArgumentException";
InvalidArgumentException.prototype.constructor = InvalidArgumentException;

Usage:

throw new InvalidArgumentException();
var err = new InvalidArgumentException("Not yet...");

=====================================

where is the error code? what would be the exception details? what is the line number/timestamp of error?why is that function making an error, i thought error/exception is a class in JS?

Ok after numerous failure in perusing subordinates to use webpack-babel to bundle their code, I forced a new stack of React onto the whole team for the built-in bundling.

Now I am crying with joy when I revamp and bundle all the old shits into one single beautiful chunk myself.

Babel fails about 10% of the time, but if I re-run it it works. What the fuck did I even get myself into, and why aren't elements of a modern javascript toolchain completely deterministic? (webpack, babel, typescript, react)

Heres a truly vitrolic and unnecessary rant:
Package control for sublime is all well and good
through the command palette, but it's just
fucking retarded. How about you point me to a
FUCKING COMMAND to actually INSTALL A
MOTHERFUCKING PACKAGE YOU
FINGERPAINTING FUCKWITS?

Under babel plugin while browsing packages
on packagecontrol.io:
"Find it as Babel through Package Control."

FUCKING HOW?

What command?

What fucking command? How do I "Find" it?
The browse command just opens my
motherfucking browser. How do I fucking install
your fucking packages you assholes?
"Use autocomplete" except your god damn
autocomplete doesn't list "install package"
for some god damn reason because everything
web is a broken pile of utter shit, built
on a more shit, like a leaning garbage tower
of bullshit waiting for the smallest mistake to
take down the entire house of cards like
someone removing a leftpad on npm.

Maybe specify I have to enter
"install package" and THEN hit enter, and THEN
enter the GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING package name
on a separate god damn line for
some fucky reason.

Next time don't make a tool that breaks
motherfucking conventions. It's bad enough
every fucking look-at-me-im-smart cunt of a
dev and their dog has to invent a CLI and
then go and invent a new domain specific
language too motherfuckers.

Next tool that breaks convention around me is
gonna see the dev lit on fire.
fucking uppity cunts.

"Say thanks" the site say. I am not
feeling fucking thankful at the moment.

The least you can do if you're going to
contribute to open source, is not make things
actively fucking worse, least of all in the
fucking *documentation*.

FUCK count for this rant: 19 / 50,
RANK: RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC

0-5: GENTLE AS A LAMB
6-10: ANGRY GOAT
11-15: NUN WITH PMS
16-20: RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC
21-25: CANTANKEROUS VIETNAM VET
26-30: BREAKING SHIT
31-35: DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE
36-40: BIPOLAR EPISODE
41-45: DESPAIR EVENT HORIZON
46-50: BROKEN CAPSLOCK

50+ : MIDLIFE CRISIS / MASTER GRAND WIZARD
OF RANTS AND ANGRY-WORD MASTURBATION.

If you prefer to cheat, you may also include any
cursewords in general, but be warned, you'll
never know the sweet taste of victory when you
achieve the rank of master grand wizard.
Like when you were a kid, and you discovered
gameshark, and all your hopes of finishing that
one game became but a ruthlessly hollowed out
husk, somewhere where could-have-been childhood
memories and nostalgia go to die like the
graveyard of dreams
(the same place officer workers souls go).

Babel WTF

Setting up an expo react / react native is a far worse feeling than installing GPU drivers + cuda toolkit for pytorch.
I have no idea how react devs are dealing with this shit. This is so horrible. Wtf is babel ? wtf is expo ? Wtf is SDK ? Wtf is eas ????????????????????

Why building a library of React component should be this hard: I'm sick of Webpack, Babel, Typescript and all the shit which is duct taped together to build some damn widgets.

Guys, I'm refactoring a server code from es5 to es6 and I would like to know how to get es6 errors like when I'm working with React. I have installed babel, and I can compile es6 code but I get errors that target the es5 (compiled) code so it's not easy to find the bug sources

Is JavaScript the Tower of Babel? What will be the long term effects of the explosion of new frameworks. I liked it when you could use a backend server side language and had JavaScript as the special sauce that could do what the backend could not do. I am sure I will be sent to hell for blaspheming the hot, new js frameworks. Oh well better to burn out than fade away.

Is there a testing library of source code snippets for testing babel plugins?

Ideally a pack of like all possible javascript snippets? Otherwise how do you know if your plugin may ever fail or cause bad code?

This is the story of how I spent 4h of my life trying to compile a simple node library written with es6 using babel 7.

My error was to use async/await. Previously babel wasn't that bad. A bit complicated and undocumented. But now is a pain in the ass as soon as you need something more than the prefix.

Don't use more time to make a compiler work than to write a library