Hacker News Reader

Comment by whstl | Hacker News Reader

What's not stable about Vite, ESLint, Typescript, Prettier? Apart from Vite itself, those have been standards for 8-10 years, and Vite itself has successfully replaced a huge mess of other tools.

I agree that ESLint can become a mess, which is why I'm ok with a new competitor that doesn't require the extra configuration. Sure: they're also replacing Prettier (unnecessary) but everyone can keep using Prettier and change if Oxfmt ever becomes better.

All the other tools here are either existing, or drop-in replacements.

View on HN

Eslint did a massive breaking change with it's config format not too long ago, and still doesn't seem like it knows what it wants to be when it grows up (I was happily using eslint for things prettier does...)

Fine, updating 8 to 9 sucked for you, and I believe you. I did mention that ESLint is the "problematic" one, that people are working hard to replace. If so what's the problem? What about the other tools?

"Ok you directly addressed one of my hand picked examples, clearly showing your point and why my example wasn't a good one. Now address all my other ones before I consider your perspective might be valid!"

This is like the comment version of the gish gallop.

No, that's an answer to a cherry-picked reply. It was one package that had a version migration. I don't necessarily agree but I'm trying to move the discussion forward rather than staying at the "it's all shit" lane.

And I gave three other examples, and I can give others: React itself has been around for 12 years, leading. Vue has been super stable too.

Migrating versions of frameworks is several magnitudes harder than migrating the ESLint config, and ESLint is optional. Migrating versions of previous tooling like Babel or Webpack is several orders of magnitude more complicated than ESLint.

I'm not even against you in general but "react for 12 years" is another really bad example with the complete paradigm change from classes to hooks. I even think hooks are better, but I'm not going to sit and tell people their fatigue isn't valid when even your argument is "some of these aren't as bad as babel or webpack".

The paradigm change you mention happened once, it was piggybacked on an existing and very popular concept (functional components), and the previous paradigm was "deprecated" by the community itself.

Sure it would be better if people had gotten it right the first time, but the fatigue problem isn't really due to React.

And my argument isn't that "X is better than Y". It's that the number of new tools showing up is WAY smaller than it was when those complaints started. Today it has become a meme here in HN, often by people outside the frontend community.

In my opinion, because there’s no core principles behind anything. jQuery was nice because it presented a nice API on to of the DOM. There was just this single layer that both your code and the libraries rely on.

But now there’s no unifying principles behind anything. No conventions. It’s just incantations to get thing working nicely together. It’s all preprocessing and post processing, code generation an what not.

For us non stable things were sass and Tailwind. Lost a lot of dev work just to upgrade those with no visible benefit at all.

Everything else is smooth and silk

Ohh, yes eslint 8 => 9 migration were also a big pain to handle.

> eslint 8 => 9 migration were also a big pain to handle.

Still not resolved. Their main recommended config is still not updated for 9.

ESLint and stable do not belong in the same sentence.

> What's not stable about [] ESLint

Like, their decision to change configuration format in a way that breaks all and every plugin, tutorial, project in existence as a giant "fuck you" to the whole ecosystem and all web developers of the world - isn't that a reason good enough to never come back at this tool ever again?

>What's not stable about Vite, ESLint, Typescript, Prettier?

It wasn't there X years ago and had changes to the config Y years ago that were very annoying time-consuming. One can believe that single digits of X and Y are "not stable enough" with a simple reason that you live in Decenarian Math.

If I stop working on a project for 3 years, will I still be able to compile it, without losing an unpredictablt amount of time to fixing the toolchain? If not, then its not really stable, is it?

As someone who “owns” a framework at work that has been unfunded for several years, the answer is definitively yes. I haven’t touched the build toolchain in all those years and the project continues to build a dozen different JavaScript libraries with no issues across multiple Node.js upgrades.

The current version of webpack was released 5 years ago. You can keep using eslint 8 which was released 4 years ago. This really isn’t the constantly changing space it was in the 2010’s

> If I stop working on a project for 3 years, will I still be able to compile it

You will certainly be able to compile it. You might have hard time updating it though.

With version pinning and lockfiles, sure.

Updating is a different matter, if you're using multiple tools, hundreds of packages and several configuration files.

Which is why a unified tool that doesn't require configuring 20 tools at once is a good idea IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com