Comment by gavinray

5 years ago

  > "I shudder everytime I need to install npm, webpack, gulp, etc..all the JS tools feel super flaky, unnecessary and does not inspire confidence in the tooling. That's my take anyways."

For context, I started doing web dev back in ES5 JS, jQuery, Angular.js (1), and server-side templated HTML views days.

I write in a lot of other languages as well, and I would hear people say this and not get it. I thought to myself:

"It's not THAT bad. I think the experience is fine."

Then I wrote an app recently on the JVM. Sweet jesus the JS/Node ecosystem is a nightmare + house of cards.

The JVM and CLR (.NET) have their stuff together. I need like ~10 dependency libraries to do a large project, and often times they are over a decade old.

The tooling is on another level.

I don't have PROBLEMS writing TS apps, and the experience is good. But some of them have a dependency tree that span thousands of packages, and I've come back 2-3 years later to try to run a project and had some downstream dep break, and then updating fails, and then...

I know it's somewhat of a meme, but this is unironically why I find Deno interesting. (Disclaimer: Haven't shipped anything with it)

Especially since with the most recent release, they have an option to emit Node-compatible JS bundles from Deno code.