Hacker News Reader

Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Gradle & Maven are just build tools. They can be used for other stuff, but that's what they're mostly used for in my experience.

View on HN

I actually find the things _around_ the languages like build tools and ansible and such by far the more confusing parts of dev work just because I never know which of them I should spend time trying to understand and if I just want a runthrough for someone who can already program I never know where to look.

Gradle, CMake, Python virtual environments...

When I started developing I felt the same way. One day I finally decided that maven was going to be around long enough (and I was going to be a java dev long enough) to spend some time learning. It didn't take long, couple days at most, man has it saved me a lot of grief over the years. CSS was the same, although it took longer than a couple of days, it has been more than worth it.

Lots of new languages that arose in reflex to the "stack complexity" of Java ... eventually achieved the same stack complexity with a totally different set of framework/tool names.

Ruby/Rails in particular became this. Javascript rocketed to this complexity level, with the added chaos of seemingly reinventing the entire toolchains every 2 years.

yeah, i never understood that part. People wanting to use javascript on the backend, but not having any of those tools. They exist for a reason, and it's not to make things more complicated.

IMO the tools that have been created to fill the gaps seem to be poor imitations of dotNet, rails, and java frameworks.

The testing framework I saw in a React app were almost straight from java, but somehow (despite JS being more flexible and script) MUCH uglier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com