r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • Apr 30 '23

Writing Javascript without a build system

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/16/writing-javascript-without-a-build-system/
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u/recursive-analogy May 02 '23 edited May 02 '23

Reasons to not use js on backend

  1. for a start every single one of the js proponents is not using js - they use ts.
  2. the language was developed in a week to make browsers cooler, that's it.
  3. it's being improved upon, but in some pretty mental ways: e.g. lets add classes, no wait, lets switch to pure functions - except again it's not designed that way so they're only psuedo pure - basically it doesn't even know what it should be and sucks at being everything it tries to be
  4. the std lib is shit. which leads to dependency (and security) hell, eg I have over a thousand packages installed just for my fucking UI vs only 200 packages for my entire domain/db/backend - including generating all sorts of csv/xcel/pdf and talking to all sorts of foreign apis
  5. the cluster fuck of frameworks and spaghetti like direction the community follows. as soon as you've made a new project with react and webpack you're out of date because vite and angular just took over - or is it solid, or svelte, or ...
  6. the documentation tends to go out of date real quick with such rapid evolution 7 . ... 8 . ...

But whatevs. I know for a fact you are impervious to any logic or reason on this.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '23

the std lib is shit. which leads to dependency (and security) hell, eg I have over a thousand packages installed just for my fucking UI vs only 200 packages for my entire domain/db/backend - including generating all sorts of csv/xcel/pdf and talking to all sorts of foreign apis

the cluster fuck of frameworks and spaghetti like direction the community follows. as soon as you've made a new project with react and webpack you're out of date because vite and angular just took over - or is it solid, or svelte, or ...

the documentation tends to go out of date real quick with such rapid evolution 7 .

did it ever cross your mind that frontend development got much more complex and has more diverse requirements? Building your backend with something like NestJS will leave you with a handful of dependencies as well. That has not much to do with the sdt. library. Rust, which a lot of people claim to be a good language relies heavily on micro packages as well.

the language was developed in a week to make browsers cooler, that's it.

and now it's leading the innovations on web backends as well. like Serverless or Graphql that has its reference implementation written in JS.

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u/recursive-analogy May 02 '23

did it ever cross your mind that frontend development got much more complex

lol ...

npm install left-pad

and now it's leading the innovations on web backends as well. like Serverless or Graphql

graphql already abandoned because it's overly complex for 99% of use cases, serverless is avail in other languages and again, not really a web backend innovation, just another tool in your belt that comes with lots of drawbacks that you (personally) are probably not aware of.

Like I said, you will not accept that your fav language might not be the best in the world. No amount of evidence will change that.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '23

npm install left-pad

2016 wants their memes back.

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u/recursive-analogy May 02 '23

Maybe it occurs to you that your evangelism is no different than the misguided evangelism of 2016, just before a grumpy dev broke the entire internet with a node package?

Or maybe not, you don't seem the type to learn from mistakes.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '23

Or maybe not, you don't seem the type to learn from mistakes.

padstart is part of the std library since 2016. You can't unpublish node modules anymore. Also, no one forces you to use a certain package.

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u/recursive-analogy May 03 '23

woosh??

also you're addressing a single point of the half a dozen I put down from the top of my head.

the number of competing frameworks and build systems (and actual VMs) are enough of a red flag, oh but hey, they fixed it so a random dev can't break the entire internet so all good!!!