Little known fact – JavaScript config files create their own gravity

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5 points·jgbbrd··3 comments

He had a bit of a point there till he lost me at "But the foolish (i.e. people writing @JavaScript / @typescript in the first place) keep going."

Oh great, another blowhard trying to tell me that the language that powers the modern web is bad because checks notes there are too many config files. Yawn.

I think it's not the language that's bad in this case, but the environment. When standard practice is such that you can't distribute even a rudimentary JS library without half a dozen config files it does seem like something is awry.

Honestly, if you're struggling with a config file for the transpiler (babelrc), one for the entire project (package.json), legibility (prettier and eslint), and type-checking (tsconfig), I have no idea how you're ever going to be comfortable building anything that's even moderately complex.

4-5 more files and some env vars sure are annoying, but it also means that I only have to deal with config once, then can build and deploy my application in almost any environment.

Also note that a lot of these config files enable you to use type checking and clean, modern JavaScript with added features and syntactic sugar that make JS easier to use. It's my understanding that the JavaScript-hating crowd has derided JS for the exclusion of these in the past ("it's a toy language" etc), so I'm not really sure what's expected here.

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