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Comment by M4v3R | Hacker News Reader

You literally just run:

> npx create-next-app@latest

Press Enter a few times for default settings and voila, you have a hello world app up and ready to run.

Just because it’s a one liner to install something doesn’t mean you aren’t installing a big, complex, over-engineered thing.

Sure, but if you want to use React to build a Hello World app, the framework is not the one I would blame for overengineering.

Look at your computer. Are all its parts and pieces strictly necessary to display the text "Hello world" on your screen? No. Why don't you throw it away and buy something simpler, then?

As someone who can juxtapose OS X 10.5 to the latest Ventura release... believe me, I wish I could.

I find it curious that we always see these opinions expressed about front end frameworks, but no one seems to have much problem with all of the complexity in back end frameworks like node, Python, Java, .Net... I have a sneaking suspicion that people are just more used to having complexity hidden from them behind a framework install, whereas front end puts everything front and center since it's all delivered to your project via npm.

Aren't most of the comments here just talking about HTML/CSS? You don't need Java or .NET for that.

Seems you haven't heard about the existence of SBOM

With 700 dependencies, 200MB, and a massive security surface.

that's still better than CRA, to make the point a few weeks ago at work, I counted > 800 dependencies and 6 high security vulnerabilities warnings. If facebook can't get their shit together, who can?

None of that gets to the browser.

The whole point is to have JS on front-end and beck-end, right? What is serving the JS? Isn't the server Node?

And large security surface means just one compromised package is required to get on the server side. If an npm update gives you security warnings after a few weeks of a vanilla project just sitting there, something is very wrong.

Sure, you could say the same about any language too though. I've used static site generators in Rust too, or Python, it's the same problem. People still use them because the benefits outweigh the minute risk of being compromised.

- npx create-next-app@latest

- npx: command not found

- install node / npx

- npx create-next-app@latest

- realise your node is too old

- install nvm / node

- npx create-next-app@latest

- answer a bunch of questions

- npm start

- get an error: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/tmp/my-app/.next/BUILD_ID'

- npm run dev

- hello world in browser

This is why web development (and python, don't get me started on the pain that is python) is not for me.

What do you code in? For any language if you don't have the toolchain set up, obviously it'll seem laborious to install it, it's not a knock on the framework used on top of the toolchain.

But python is already installed on most linux systems

Which Python, 2 or 3? How will you handle local versus global dependencies? Will you use pip, conda, virtualenv or something else? How will you package up the code and/or executable?

It's not as simple as shipping code to the user.

Java/Kotlin. You define where to get the dependencies in a simple script, you define the version of the build tools, a wrapper script fetches the build tools (gradle) for you and that's it. Everything is neatly cached system-wide where possible and on a project-level otherwise. No conflicts, no shenanigans.

You still had to set that toolchain up, which is my point.

Don't forget, Next.js has telemetry by default unless you run:

  npx next telemetry disable

Or set environment variable:

  NEXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1

npm is biggest hurdle for me to learn nodejs.

For me it has never worked in first attempt.

On other hand Ruby on Rails bundler very rarely game me errors, and for every error provided hints what to do.

The issue in the above example is not NPM, it's Next.

If you don't have the toolchain set up, it's not like it's different for any other language.

- echo "hello world" > /tmp/index.html

- browse to file:///tmp/index.html

echo - command not found (maybe you're on Windows)

browse - no browser installed

edit - no editor found

See, I can do the same thing. In any case you need a toolchain installed to actually program in the language you want to program, even if that toolchain is minimal. Complaining about a toolchain not being installed for the thing you want to do is not very useful.

There is always a text editor and browser available on any OS, yes even on Windows.

> In any case you need a toolchain installed to actually program in the language you want to program, even if that toolchain is minimal

Yes, as I said.

> - install node / npx

> - npx create-next-app@latest

> - realise your node is too old

Said no one ever. I can fully understand you not having Node installed (although having any kind of toolchain installed is a prerequisite for any programming so that's a weak argument against Node). But please don't tell me that somehow you will get an old version of Node after you just installed Node, because this is just reaching now.

> - npm start

> - get an error: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/tmp/my-app/.next/BUILD_ID'

The README that gets generated with the project literally spells out the correct command you should use to run the project during development (which is not `npm start`), so this argument is also pretty weak.

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