this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Programming
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When there's no build step, all the time is spent coding. None of it is spent configuring or setting up.
The hardest part of any software class in my experience is the triple combo of:
When I have students start off editing one html file using pinned URL imports, the reliability is just insane. People might claim "installing typescript is reliable" but doesn't even come close to the reliability of not having a build step at all. No build step Just Works™, no M1 Mac edgecases, no npm audit, no rm rf node_modules.
You always have linter steps, testing etc and a competent developer should be able to deal with all that. Of course you don't start with all this with new students, but I don't think that is what this post is about.
Sure, all I'm saying is every layer has major cost, and JS development has a lot of layers. Corporate websites can financially and time-wise afford that complexity cost when the benefits are scaled across millions of users.
But its a problem when the first result of YouTube tutorials for a one page To-do app uses a pipeline as conceptually* deep as:
I think OP is asking if it's possible for a good (no jQuery, no global varnames, etc) Todo app to work without needing all that.
And the simple answer is no. You can remove a layer here and there, but this is what the modern dev environment looks like.
I mean sure you can implement all that yourself and carry all the extra cognitive load, but it is not productive to even skip babel or so. There is no point, but the challenge.
Of course it is a bit more complicated to pick the right tools and you don't have to use everything, but that's a whole different discussion.
I would disagree.
There's more to software than big corporate websites or massive FOSS projects. I've made tons of little one-html-file sites, like an inflation-adjusted income calculator, a scheduling app I've used every week for 4 years, a chemistry converter/calculator for a class I was in, even my resume site is just a single html file. Not only that but most of my published deno modules are nothing more than a main.js, a readme, and a gitignore (no package.json, no node_modules, no install step).
You don't need tests, and a linter, and babel, and tree shaking, and JSX, and typescript, and souce maps just to make a resume site, or an infographic, or a one-off internal dashboard, or a simple blog, or a restraunt menu. Modern ES http imports and modern JS tooling is enough.
None of the tools are really made for the most trivial use cases though. Although it doesn't take much effort to set everything up in a simple project I would probably also skip most of it. But this discussion about tiny one off projects is kinda pointless as you don't have many of the problems to solve anyway.
I implemented a reddit frontend (kiosk mode) a while back using only vanilla JS for fun, because a previous implementation by someone else broke. There was not really a point though as it wasn't even simpler than using the proper tools. It was just for the hell of it, but nowhere close to a "real" project.