LMAO! The best rant of 2016 and mostly true!!!
BTW Node isn’t a language ;)
2015 is when web development went to shit. Web development used to be nice. You could fire up a text editor and start creating JS and CSS files. You can absolutely still do this. That has not changed. So yes, everything I’m about to say can be invalidated by saying that.
The web (specifically the Javascript/Node community) has created some of the most complicated, convoluted, over engineered tools ever conceived.
Node.js/NPM
At times, I think where web development is at this point is some cruel joke played on us by Ryan Dahl. You see, to get into why web development is so terrible, you have to start at Node.
By definition I was a magpie developer, so undoubtedly I used Node, just as everyone should. At universities they should make every developer write an app with Node.js, deploy it to production, then try to update the dependencies 3 months later. The only downside is we would have zero new developers coming out of computer science programs.
You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server. Combine that with all the magpies that were using Ruby at the time, and you have the perfect fucking storm. Lets take everything that was great in Ruby and re write it in Javascript, I think was the official motto.
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Babel
Now it’s some convoluted mess of plugins that tries to do everything everyone ever wanted, while actually doing nothing out of the box. Sebastian seemed like a nice guy, then goes to Facebook and comes out with Babel 6, then to really shove it in my face, he uses that screaming pile of dump called Phabricator to handle issues.
Maybe all the idle Facebook engineers who created Phabricator can get with the idle Uber engineers who created the branding page, and come up with something that is better.
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React
I don’t even know where to start with this project. From what I can tell the background of React is: Facebook couldn’t create a notification indicator on Facebook.com, so they create this over engineered dump pile to solve that problem. Now they can tell you how many unread posts you have while downloading 15 terabytes of Javascript. Once they solved that issue they proceeded to write everything in React. They even built a comment system with it, because you know making an Ajax call and a DOM append is really hard.
That’s right. All you guys using React like it’s the only way to solve every problem ever are using it because Facebook couldn’t build a fucking notification icon.
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Please guys/girls, just take a step back every now and then. How does rewriting your interface in the latest framework get you to the next customer? Or the next 50 customers. Does it actually make your customers happier?
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Don’t fucking build a SPA
Really all I’m saying is don’t build a SPA. A SPA will lock you into a framework that has the shelf life of a hamster dump. When you think you need a SPA, just stop thinking. Just don’t. Your users just don’t fucking care.
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Hello my name is Drew and I’m a recovering magpie front end developer.