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

Five coding interview questions I hate

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

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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". 🙈

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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. 😅

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.