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Comment by cygned | Hacker News Reader

What really bugs me about JSX is the complexity it introduces to the build pipeline - which might be fine for senior developers, but I regularly see junior developers struggle with configuration and errors.

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You get a ton of other benefits from buying into a webpack-style build system though:

- Modules - TypeScript - Newer JavaScript syntax - SASS compilation - Code splitting

etc.

For me, it's hard to imagine a medium/large sized JS project without using some kind of module system. And once you've setup the build system for that, you might as well use all of the other features that it enables.

You can get modules now in many browsers, as well as the latest JS syntax, without needing any build step.

Code splitting/vendoring has changed with HTTP2, and will continue to change as HTTP3 comes along.

SASS compilation, and if you choose to use TypeScript, will require a build step, but at least the SASS side of that is very easy and straight forward by itself.

You're still missing a few of the finer points of stage 0-3 optiosn for babel. Also, that bloats out to a lot of requests with full round-trip time, and no real good server solutions for bundling via HTTP2/3 push yet.

To be fair, I see junior devs struggle with all build tools.

This is true, and further to this point, I don't think there is or should be any crossover between 'junior' and 'configuring build pipelines'. To me that's by definition a task for a senior Engineer.

Put another way, if you have a skillset that includes configuring and/or maintaining non-trivial build pipelines, you're not a junior Engineer any more.

Which is why as a Senior Engineer, some of the best productivity you can build for your team is to be able tell a Junior when starting a new application, "clone this template, npm start to debug it, it uses Typescript, you'll learn it as you work with it I promise, just let me know when you need help with something complex, and I'll be here to help you through all your PRs". (Or F5 to start in something like Visual Studio, depending on familiarity levels of Juniors you are trying to work with.)

Junior developers are often just fine trusting build systems as block boxes once you've got them setup for them.

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