Comment by Carpetsmoker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Carpetsmoker | Hacker News Reader

"Quickly" using the JavaScript tooling is somewhat akin to watching one or two episodes of the 6th Game of Thrones season without watching anything else. You really need to watch season 1-5 to understand what's going on.

The other day I wanted to publish a little script I've been maintaining for years as a module easily usable by WebPack and whatnot, and that's much easier said than done. I published it on npm and put some UMD magic thing in there, and I think it should work now ... but I'm not really sure to be honest (still need to look at this and confirm).

Just searching "publish JavaScript module" and trying to make sense of the WebPack isn't really all that helpful, not for me anyway, as I'm joining half-way through season 6.

I have no opinion on the tooling as such – I lack experience to have an informed opinion – but it sure is confusing to "quickly" do something for people who are not heavily involved in it (i.e. me)

> "Quickly" using the JavaScript tooling is somewhat akin to watching one or two episodes of the 6th Game of Thrones season without watching anything else. You really need to watch season 1-5 to understand what's going on.

I disagree. In both cases, you really only need one or two episodes to know that the story is not going anywhere. It will only get more complicated and convoluted without ever rewarding you, you will realize that no thought was ever put into it, and you will only stay for the ride because of sunk costs.

That's nice and all. Unfortunately, (to stay in the metaphor) the PM has arranged to quiz you on the main plot points of season 6 three days from now, so your best option is to find a good plot summary for seasons 1-5 on Youtube somewhere.

As time goes on the breath of questions increases so necessarily the depth must decrease, due to all the history of the language (JS, C# or whatever). You are not a code now you are an archaeologist. It was so much easier in the year 2000!

> The other day I ... put some UMD magic thing in there

Whoa. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

I was under the impression this was still the best way to do it for maximum compatibility ... but perhaps that character got killed in season 3 and I missed it

UMD was a way to do AMD (which died years ago), CommonJS or script tags (also dead for modules).

These days you'd just add the right bit to commonJS to say this is an ES6 module.

>UMD magic thing

I use rollup for libraries and webpack only for fullblown frontend projects for precisely this reason.

I don't use it at all, but others do and I think my little library is neat enough for others to benefit. Unfortunately, I can't get any of thus UMD stuff to work, so for the time being I just "window.imgzoom = function(..) { .. }" it shrug.

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