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Comment by flimsypremise | Hacker News Reader

If you're using JS modules and ESLint, you are using a frontend build. You can certainly go back to the days of jquery and vanilla CSS with none of the advantages of modern dependency management, transpilation and module loading, but if you try to do that at even a small company you are not going to last long. These tools exist for a reason, and most people who don't see the point of them were not around for the bad times before the existed.

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> If you're using JS modules and ESLint, you are using a frontend build

Browsers natively support JS modules with no frontend builds needed (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid...).

You just need to specify `type="module"` in your `<script>` tag

I mean, you could do that, but as someone who has been doing this for a very long time, I would not recommend it. If your application is very simple and has very few dependencies it might work, though I think you'll have a lot of trouble managing your dependencies across multiple environments. You wouldn't distribute a C application without a Makefile, and you shouldn't distribute or deploy a frontend application without the equivalent dependency management and build orchestration. These tools exist not just to help one developer create and app that works, but to help teams manage code contribution and dependency management across environments.

> You wouldn't distribute a C application without a Makefile

And yet, SQLite does just that. They distribute as a single .c file. I wrote a moderately successful lcov replacement in python that I distribute as a single .py file so people can directly run it without needing pip (if desired). There's a time and a place for needing build systems, but as a minimalist I default to vanilla + no build system and that serves me very well the vast majority of the time.

> and you shouldn't distribute or deploy a frontend application without the equivalent dependency management and build orchestration

Why not? That's the other thing. What are all these dependencies you are talking about that need "managing"? Most web apps I've written have needed 1 dependency (bootstrap CSS). Maybe PIXI or ThreeJS if making something graphical. Include it in the html, boom done, no npm needed.

Take a look at this guy's blog and tell me that he needs to abandon vanilla and start using a frontend build system: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

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