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A good history of where modern JavaScript comes from (from old school to webpack and babel).

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-...

Helped me understand the how and why of webpack.

When people shit on modern web development, it's hard to explain how responsible tools like webpack and babel have been in pushing the web forward so we can actually build what we can imagine.

There is SO MUCH we simply don't think about anymore because the tools do the thinking for us, like CSS prefixing mentioned in the article. I can't remember the last time I manually prefixed a CSS property, I've used tools that have autoprefixing built in since 2015. I just don't think about it anymore. Nor the differences between ES3, ES5, ES2015, ES2017 or a host of other things.

This means my brain is free to spend that energy in other places and that's absolutely a godsend for productivity.

People shit on modern web development exactly because these kludges are necessary in the first place. Imagine if that time and effort was spent on something more productive instead.

The problem is that those tools, while solving some problems in the development stage, create a host of other problems at other points in time: first install, building, deployment, maintenance...

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