Pontifications

  • To this old fart LOL :-) Modern JavaScript Explained For Dinosaurs still makes JS development sound 100% not fun and not 100% not developer friendly and in fact “worse than it seems” :-) NOT “not as bad as it seems”.
  • But I’m an optimist and remain confident that something will emerge that abstracts away or reduces the need for the yak shaving explained in this post.

QUOTE

So this is modern JavaScript in a nutshell. We went from plain HTML and JS to using a package manager to automatically download 3rd party packages, a module bundler to create a single script file, a transpiler to use future JavaScript features, and a task runner to automate different parts of the build process. Definitely a lot of moving pieces here, especially for beginners. Web development used to be a great entry point for people new to programming precisely because it was so easy to get up and running; nowadays it can be quite daunting, especially because the various tools tend to change rapidly.

Still, it’s not as bad as it seems. Things are settling down, particularly with the adoption of the node ecosystem as a viable way to work with the frontend. It’s nice and consistent to use npm as a package manager, node require or import statements for modules, and npm scripts for running tasks. This is a vastly simplified workflow compared to even a year or two ago!

END QUOTE

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