Hacker News Reader

Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

Not to be curmudgeonly but this is exactly what I would expect from public sector.

- Odd technology choices. It took me a long time to figure out what .njk files were.

- Misapplication of popular technologies. They're using webpack for... something? But most of the actual bundling is done by hand with gulp, and a lot of the JavaScript is operating in the global scope.

- Overselling. It's just a bunch of scss with some mostly-HTML components.

View on HN

>It took me a long time to figure out what .njk files were.

Nunjucks is a very popular JS templating language (more or less a straight port of the even more popular jinja2) - it's not an odd choice at all.

https://github.com/mozilla/nunjucks

This entire thing will compile down to regular HTML/CSS. This is about as future proof as you can get.

Would this be more impressive to you if it were React or Angular? Your users don’t care that it’s Nunjucks or Sass. Nunjucks and Sass are perfectly fine.

But obviously the users are not the only or even major constituency here. These are UI components to be used by other developers and (like all software) to be modified down the road to satisfy new and changed requirements. Technology choices matters greatly.

The NHS is probably concerned with stability, accessibility and performance. Also I would like you to please explain why sass and Nunjucks are not good for “satisfying changed requirements”

Edit:

Also, are you serious that GDS should consider front end developers their constituents and not their users?

As it’s a open project, have you considered opening a GitHub issue or even a pull request with some recommendations on better approaches/tools?

> It took me a long time to figure out what .njk files were.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-ab&q=.njk+fil... I mean how long are talking here? 5s or 2 days?.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com