Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkh | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com