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Comment by albb0920 | Hacker News Reader

I was very frustrated when I tried to move to gulp+sass+babel+uglifier tool chain, It took me an afternoon to set everything up before I can write any actual code.

The whole thing looks like to be designed toward make big and long-term maintained website, not toward helping you to hack up throw away site quickly.

Stuff like gulp, after I installed it globally, I still have to install it per project, which makes little sense to me.

It used to be just "compass init; compass watch", and start write stuff, uglify JS before deploy, then done.

I still hates JS, I don't get why a language once hated by everyone, now is sexy again. PHP in contrast, have improved a lot since 5.3, and it actually quite fun to write these days.

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PHP is the diamond in the rough. Don't let all the bad tutorials fool you, beneath is a great platform where you are truly productive.

You get far by only having PHP and you get twice that by only installing composer.

No insane build steps, no running server process that needs to be hot reloaded, composer is faster relative npm, decent typing system and built in development web server.

To make PHP a superb language(okay, a better language :-) I wish for three things.

  * Typed callable signatures
  * Function autoloading
  * Generics

Looking forward to the possibility of a jit in PHP 8.

Have you looked at Hack? It has all those features.

Unfortunately not. Have thought about to add it to our test runners.

Sounds nice! If I understand correctly, the setup is a bit more complicated.

In Visual Studio you go from 0 to "Hello world" in about as much time it takes to download and install the behemoth. And if you're having trouble with some part of the toolchain you'll know that everybody using the same version of VS will have the same tools so there's a very clear way to find help: "Visual Studio {$version} {$description_problem}".

While ASP.Net used to be (pre MVC) the shitty enterprise sloth that was holding you back to any serious quick development now a full web stack looks like more work to maintain than using VS. I think that should alarm some people.

Things should "just work" while I am getting things done. And if not there should be a reliable way to troubleshoot it.

PHP definitely got better while it still has a lot to improve. It just looks a lot less ugly when I see it, actually smart sometimes.

You should be able to use one IDE with full autocomplete (not autoguess) and a full stack going from project creation to project publishing. Otherwise your time is wasted.

Yay Microsoft!

I would only quibble about the car-crash that has been attempting to download VS 2017 from behind a corporate (bank) firewall.

The whole thing looks like to be designed toward make big and long-term maintained website,

It most-likely fails at that, too, when the current technologies you're using become outdated.

When you install a package locally, executable files get added to node_modules/.bin. So you can run gulp using node_modules/.bin/gulp. Also, npm scripts automatically have that directory added to their path when they are run, which lets you use npm run to access things like gulp.

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