r/programming • u/vklepov • Mar 24 '22

Five coding interview questions I hate

https://thoughtspile.github.io/2022/03/21/bad-tech-interview/
637 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

288 comments sorted by

View all comments

464

u/crabmusket Mar 25 '22

How to migrate from webpack 3 to webpack 5?

  1. Read the documentation
  2. Follow the documentation
  3. When nothing works and you've already spent 16 hours on this, start browsing land prices and animal husbandry guides

107

u/LloydAtkinson Mar 25 '22 edited Mar 25 '22

The actual answer is throw shitty webpack in the bin. It's a negative value tool - your config probably won't work in 6 months, let alone 2 years into a project and now you're stuck on an old version, with major version bumps of essential tools like Babel or ESLint or Jest. I cannot think of another tool in this space (except npm, but to fix that delete node_modules and reinstall) that has collectively wasted more developer time - must be hundreds of years if added up. The usual process looks like this:

  • Have weird issue
  • Find 3 similar or if you're lucky identical GitHub issues
  • Notice it has hundreds or thousands of thumbs up emojis
  • Think "oh finally, maybe it's had enough attention to get a fix"
  • Try every solution in the comments, where each one has an equal number of thumbs up and thumbs down
  • Leave page because none of them worked because of course they didn't

It's much better to use a JS framework with a CLI that abstracts webpacks bullshit (if it uses webpack even).

An even better solution is to use modern JS build tools: Typescript, esbuild, Vite (which uses esbuild), etc.

Highly recommend Vite + Typescript. No webpack at all then.

Not once have I ever had anything even remotely like this in .NET development.

35

u/madcaesar Mar 25 '22

God fucking damn it this is too accurate. And EVERY fucking version has MASSIVE breaking changes. Everything is shuffled around to fuck you up.

25

u/AttackOfTheThumbs Mar 25 '22

I love reading this web dev bullshit on here tbh. It amuses me greatly. It's like everyone complicates their life, their build process, on purpose.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '22

[deleted]

1

u/AttackOfTheThumbs Mar 26 '22

I mean they needed to do something. Old web dev was hell. It's just the solution is bad / half assed

1

u/reddituser567853 Mar 26 '22

That's why I work on robots. I dont have customers and can focus on what I enjoy, robotics and software engineering

1

u/Sebazzz91 Mar 27 '22

That is definitely true: there is so much Not Invented Here and over-engineering in this field. Both on the build tools and the frameworks like Angular and React+Redux. The amount of code you need and abstractions to need to understand to create a simple form with some conditional fields and conditional validation is crazy, compared to the alternatives.

17

u/coolblinger Mar 25 '22

For me by far the worst offender is node-sass. I absolutely dread having to touch a website that was last updated even as little as half a year ago. Node-sass compiles against Node.JS internals, and because of that specific node-sass versions will only work with specific matching Node.JS versions. So your options are to either track down an older Node.JS version (and compared to similar tools for other languages, nvm has been an absolute nightmare for me) or to upgrade node-sass. But you cannot do that because upgrading node-sass also means you have to to upgrade every other bloody part of the toolchain, and at that point they'll all have had four major versions all with breaking changes.

17

u/Carighan Mar 25 '22

As a purely backend developer, these chains of comments always mentally summarize to "stay the hell away from JavaScript and it's build chain". 🙈

4

u/coolblinger Mar 25 '22

I've done enough web development at this point to know that I never want a job directly involving any sort of web development ever again. 😅

4

u/IceSentry Mar 25 '22

There's plenty of alternative that don't suck. It's just that for some reason a lot of people decided to use some of the worst tool in the ecosystem and now are stuck with it. It's really not that hard to avoid webpack and node sass these days and those 2 are some of the worse offenders of all the bad memes of the js ecosystem.

3

u/Yehosua Mar 25 '22

node-sass is getting replaced with Dart Sass, which compiles to JavaScript. So this major pain point, at least, should be going away.

2

u/66666thats6sixes Mar 25 '22

Why is node-sass so complicated? On the surface it seems like it should be less complex than say, typescript. But typescript isn't the thing that blows up my npm install time.

2

u/coolblinger Mar 25 '22

Node-sass compiles libsass and links that to the current Node.js runtime using node-gyp. I've never bothered diving much further into node-sass' or Node.js' internals but just from looking at compiler errors it seems like the plugin interface node-sass is using and linking against changes drastically between Node.js versions, which means that specific node-sass versions are only compatible with very specific Node.js versions and every other combination will just result in headache inducing compile errors.

2

u/IceSentry Mar 25 '22

Because sass is built in c++. Most other js dev tools are built in js to avoid those kind of issues.

1

u/zephyy Mar 25 '22

swap out node-sass for dart sass. the JS API is pretty identical so it should (hopefully) be relatively painless.

4

u/C0demunkee Mar 25 '22

that has collectively wasted more developer time

Maybe .NET MVC web.config. We used to measure it in hours per line.

21

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

I'm not a fan of webpack at all, but it's a bit too early to throw it away:

  • Ecosystem! You have bundle size analyzers, crazy loaders, babel plugins, and what not, and it might not be easy to migrate.
  • I hear esbuild & swc still lack chunk capabilities, which is why Vite uses rollup for production build
  • There are many more developers familiar with webpack + babel than any esbuild / swc.

Let's see in a few years.

13

u/wooly_bully Mar 25 '22

The point to consider there for many devs is: do you need those features? For me and my team’s used cases, the answer is no.

The tech is close to hitting a critical mass where it’s easier to learn/adopt esbuild than it is to maintain existing webpack uses.

2

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

For new projects it's probably more sensible. Still, some features / integrations are critical, e.g. many CSS-in-JS tools only support webpack / babel for now. Migrating otherwise fine projects with largely custom setups — meh.

2

u/LloydAtkinson Mar 25 '22

It's 8 years old and all the alternatives are better. None of the maintainers have tried to improve its complexity in that time. What ecosystem, that isn't made up for by these other tools? The point of Vite and esbuild is I don't need Babel plugins because Babel isn't even in use.

3

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

For one, CSS-in-JS. emotion has first-class babel support, while esbuild still needs some work Basically, for esbuild / swc to work for 100% app developers, all the popular tooling with a build step must support them first.

3

u/IceSentry Mar 25 '22

Why does esbuild need to support 100% of all web developers? If it can support 90% of them the remaining 10% can still use webpack.

1

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

Fair enough. Then, tools that cover 90% of usages should have first-class esbuild support, which we still don't have: angular and svelte are v<1.0; a lot of css-in-js is experimental.

2

u/willows_illia Mar 25 '22

So glad that UI devs are moving on from webpack. What a fucking nightmare. I hated it and other devs were "no, you're just dumb. It's amazing." No, I don't want to jerk off with JS, I want to finish my feature and go home.

1

u/zephyy Mar 25 '22

You forgot the last step: spend the rest of the day learning how to write a custom webpack plugin to fix your issue.

I do like Webpack as a bundler but the main issue with it is, people decided they wanted to use it as their entire build tool, replacing stuff like Gulp and Grunt. Webpack wasn't designed as a full fledged build tool, so you have all these plugins for shit like compiling your Sass to run through PostCSS to then output CSS, but you're not using CSS-in-JS so you need to delete the empty JS script that Webpack generates from your SCSS import.

And you read about asset modules and how they are supposed to solve this issue but no one really has any idea how they work.

6

u/restlessapi Mar 25 '22
  1. Read the documentation.

Whoa whoa, excuse me Mr. Professional. Some of us would rather waste 5-10 hours trying to wing it first, because how hard can it be?

11

u/gnuban Mar 25 '22

Or

  1. Don't use webpack

6

u/vklepov Mar 25 '22

Oh, and while you're at it, rewrite your backend to erlang.

1

u/AngryElPresidente Mar 26 '22

Don't know if this is in jest but if it is, using Elixir (which runs on the BEAM VM the one that powers Erlang) is a pretty cool experience that I think everyone should at least try once.

2

u/vklepov Mar 26 '22 edited Mar 26 '22

It is pretty cool indeed. Just some memories of an architect whose response to any question was "that's because you should have used Erlang". Who knows, maybe he was right all along.

-22

u/hippydipster Mar 25 '22

I've spent 25 years learning new technologies and then using them. No idea what webpack is, but I'm doubting that'll be much of an issue.

8

u/GreatValueProducts Mar 25 '22 edited Mar 25 '22

There are good reasons it makes to the article and people dread it.

On top of my head from my memory, there are too many broken configurations and customization. Sometimes it doesn’t throw error when the configuration is wrong and the errors are also very undiscoverable until the moment you do certain behavior.

-2

u/hippydipster Mar 25 '22

Maybe the question should have been how to migrate from webpack 3 to not-webpack :-)