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JavaScript Bloat in 2024
(tonsky.me)
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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Programming
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As someone who never did much web development, I was... surprised... at the amount of tooling that existed to paper over this issue. The headaches which stood out for me were JavaScript bundling (then you need to choose which tool to use - WebPack but then that's slow so then you switch to esbuild) and minified code (but that's hard to debug so now you need source maps to re-reverse the situation).
Of course the same kind of work needs to be done when developing programs in other languages. But something about developing in JS felt so noisy. Imagine if to compile Java or Rust you needed to first choose and configure your own compiler, each presenting their own websites with fancy logos adorning persuasive marketing copy.
My hypothesis is the JavaScript ecosystem is like 50:5:1 of junior : intermediate: expert contributors.
That's why there's so much "fuck it, I'll make a new project from scratch!" and "screw conventions I'm making a breaking change". Those are frankly very junior attitudes, and they feel more common in JavaScript land.
I don't have any data to back this, but it's my guess.
That or the ecosystem is just so polluted with bad ideas, people aren't learning good practices.
Yeah I hated Web development when ever i had to do it. Web development as a whole feels half undercooked and half overcooked.
So-called "backend" I was OK with. HTTP is well-specified. It's a too general of a protocol what it's being used for, so you're stuck implementing the same stuff over and over again. When using SMTP or NNTP you realise how much work the protocol does for you when building systems on top of it.
But "frontend"... Jesus talk about abusing something that was never designed to be used like it is. Total nightmare in my opinion! UIs which are totally inconsistent in appearance and behaviour has somehow become the norm!
I don't know about that. Frameworks like React or CSS toolkits have made things more consistent across browsers. Being rid of Internet Explorer helped, too. Things were way worse 15 years ago.
Now, making the browser into a quasi operating system might not have been a good idea, but that's a different argument.
I switched jobs from one using a mostly C++ stack to one using a Typescript/JavaScript stack for a large application. I was absolutely shocked at how slow and generally shitty the tooling for JavaScript is, and coming from C++ land the bar was already very low.