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Comment by scarecrowbob | Hacker News Reader

I'm not totally sure about the context for the OP, but just recently there are a lot of folks doing low-end PHP dev work for WordPress, and many of them are now having to learn React because WordPress has changed its backend editor to a system that is based around React.

Personally, I think that this is a good choice-- the editor system in that CMS is a very good use case for complex JS technologies.

But at the same time, there are a whole lot of of folks who have been doing a lot of work with PHP who didn't want to learn that toolchain.

In that context, it's a little complex: we have a whole ecosystem of businesses and developers and software tooling that is being pushed over by some core changes. I'd bet that there are going to be a lot of frustrated low-end PHP devs dragged into learning modern-ish JS tooling.

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> modern-ish JS tooling

This need a lot more scary quotes around modern and tooling.

The JS "ecosystem" is a cancer: nowadays when you want to do some front-end work with some CSS you usually end with an install of node and npm/webpack/the-shit-du-jour, half of them crying about incompatibilities and how you should use the shit-du-lendemain instead to compile you don't really don't know what, it still takes 20mn to see the result. All you wanted was to edit some CSS. And surprise: now half of your other projects won't build anymore because you had to install npm-1.911-HELP-ME-DAD and the option to not install globally changed from -not-everywhere to --just-a-local-beer.

npm only installs globally when you tell it to, it's not like pip or ruby gems. And you don't need to install project dependencies globally to run scripts from packages, npm puts all that stuff in node_modules/.bin so you can just add that to your $PATH and you're set.

no $PATH editing is necessary when using npx

Yikes. There's nothing stopping someone from creating a CSS and HTML file and being done. The trap is following standards and common practices for enterprise-level front end development when they don't suit the requirements. Simply editing a CSS file requires none of the things you are complaining about. It certainly doesn't require globally installing npm packages.

It does if you're coming into an existing project that was build that way.

Let's say you want to use bootstrap 4 and sprinkle some gradients. You'll have to rebuild it. Which imposes the use of npm.

Yeah, if you want to use the tools you need to use the tool chain.

On the other hand, I work with a whole lot of other peoples' WordPress projects. A lot of folks just crap some CSS wherever they can find a spot and call it done.

FWIW, I'd rather troubleshoot someone's gulpfile than dick around with a 4K line CSS file. But that's my choice and I know plenty of folks who pay their bills and would rather grep (well, they don't use grep because they don't know the CLI) and who love a monolithic CSS file.

I like the tools, some folks don't. But they aren't inherently bad tools, they are just not right for everything.

If someone has hitched their entire career to one particular software then it's their responsibility to stay abreast of the changes that the developers of that software introduce.

> a whole lot of of folks who have been doing a lot of work with PHP who didn't want to learn that toolchain.

Those people are not entitled to learn one thing and then be able to get work forever, the wordpress technical leadership (i.e. the ones who actually work on the core software day to day and make the technical decisions) are making changes that they feel enhance the product or make it easier to maintain, if a particular wordpress developer has a problem with that then they can either choose to support only the old versions or just learn something new. The other option is to work on some other PHP software that isn't making changes.

Yeah, I agree.

But the WordPress "Community" has a lot of peculiarities that are unique to that system.

Interesting, I knew they had a new editor, since I have a few WordPress blogs, but I only use them, I don't code anything with them, so I hadn't considered how they're rewritten. I don't mind when SPA is used properly, and in this case it only affects one specific use case which makes a lot of sense.

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