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Comment by toadkicker | Hacker News Reader

One of things I absolutely despise about the JS community is this obsession with build tools. JS is meant to be a runtime language and the amount of transpilers, minifiers, uglifiers, obfusicationifiers, is absolutely endemic to the messy state of change the language is undergoing.

However with this release I'm excited to start deleting a bunch of ridiculous build code to make Webpack work. Really a build tool is a tool, it should never be in the way of developing features. I haven't enjoyed using webpack until now. No sensible defaults, poor documentation, and no standard conventions. This release changes all of those complaints. A boost for productivity is a win in my book.

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Not all web developers build complex web apps out of sport, it is demanded of us to deliver that. JS as a runtime language had poor first time support to help us manage that complexity. We are lucky that some well meaning folks decided to offer tools to help us with that, and the ecosystem has been maturing.

Probably the reason you perceive this obsession with build tools is that incrementally each one had the goal to tackle a set of problems and it did, but then new pain points appeared and other tools were developed to help with that.

That being said, we seem to have reached a rather stable period without major raptures in the landscape for a couple of years. Maybe the growing pains are subsiding.

Funny how you rarely see the same complaint about C++. You've got CMake, Make, Conan, vcpkg, and a bunch of other build tools that all require a hugely complicated setup process to get right. None of these ship with sensible defaults out of the box, and the documentation for them (especially CMake) is absolutely horrible, worse than any JS build tool.

Transpilers are nasty alright, but I like being able to write in Typescript and LESS, and to have my src split into multiple files but my distribution as a single Js file

>One of things I absolutely despise about the JS community is this obsession with build tools. JS is meant to be a runtime language and the amount of transpilers, minifiers, uglifiers, obfusicationifiers, is absolutely endemic to the messy state of change the language is undergoing.

All of it is ultimately to turn JS into a good language. Considering the state where JS started, it's been a heroic amount of effort.

The major issues with javascript are:

- Lack of native module support. - Lack of standard libraries. - Need to run in the most hostile environments AKA web browsers and in windows/linux/macOs as nodejs.

Web pack, minifiers, transpilers etc are working( although, not pretty) solutions to the afore mentioned problems.

Why are you using webpack, especially given your hate for build tools?

Nobody forces you to use them. You can continue to manage manually your hundreds of JS files in your index.html if you prefer.

Found the grumpy old coder

Personal attacks will get you banned here. So will repeatedly posting unsubstantive comments, which I'm afraid you have.

Could you please take the spirit of this site more to heart, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html? That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

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