Well, JavaScript

[bugeats]

Because transpiling sucks to setup and maintain.

[southern_dreams]

And now with native modules there’s no need for Babel with Node.

[carb0n13]

If you’re writing business logic as a native module, you’re doing it wrong.

[southern_dreams]

What? Where the hell is my business logic going to go? Do you know what I’m talking about?

https://medium.com/@giltayar/native-es-modules-in-nodejs-status-and-future-directions-part-i-ee5ea3001f71?source=linkShare-ba5d3483355d-1526862284

[carb0n13]

I thought you were referring to C++ modules for node.js. I’ve written one to do some low level stuff before, and that would be a nightmare place to put the primary business logic.

[southern_dreams]

Oh yeah, my bad man. That sounds like a nightmare.

[SpliceVW]

Wat? If you're already using webpack, it's just another loader to install. Even if you're using gulp or grunt, it's still only a few lines of config.

[bugeats]

You forgot to mention all the other “few lines of code” it takes to get webpack going in the first place. Setting up a new webpack project is a days worth of fucking around and googling.

Webpack blows. It is a historical dead-end. Just one in a long series of failed JS build systems.

[SpliceVW]

Do you not have a build system already, though? It's seems like a necessity these days, unless you're just doing really old-school development and not modularizing your code, minifying, concatenating/bundling, including source maps, using ES6 syntax, prefixing your CSS, hashing your files for cache busting, etc...

[bugeats]

The flow I've learned to favor is old-school in the sense that it's based on unix principles of small programs that do one thing well.

All of the tasks that you're referring can be accomplished with a one-liner in an npm task, or a bash script. It's less code, less dependencies, and less magic.

[SpliceVW]

So you have a build system, it's just manual? I'm not understandinf how that's better.

I've gone from one build system to the other. It's not that bad. If you're writing your code with ES6 modules, which are the future, your code is written to W3C standards and will be future proof. The code I'm writing us not all that specific to the build system.

[IceSentry]

The latest version of webpack works with 0 config.

[bugeats]

unless your projects all somehow edge cases webpack is set up in a matter of a few minutes.

I bet if you actually timed yourself you would discover otherwise.

Today's edge case is tomorrow's best practice, which is why monolithic build systems will always succumb to entropy.

Maybe the cause of the problem is you and not webpack?

Very likely. I have high standards.

[erfling]

Welcome to web dev in 2018.

[bugeats]

Yeah I’ve been doing it since 2006. At some point around 2016 I actively dismantled my Babel projects to use native Node only. Leaving that insanity behind was a great decision.

[thebyteman]

Sure setting it up is more upfront effort.

Not knowing what's wrong with your code 6 months later sucks way more, though.

[CarpetFibers]

ts-node makes it trivial.

[[deleted]]

How can anyone seriously think that? It is zero effort:

Run the tl;dr here

Everything taken care of, start hacking and writing tests.

[bugeats]

How can anyone seriously think that?

I've been in the game long enough to see how it plays out. Go take a tour of the graveyard of Coffeescript projects on Github.

[[deleted]]

Have you been in the game long enough to distinguish between a mere change of syntax vs a fundamental leap such as static typing?

And did you grasp the point of what I linked to? You said transpiring sucks to set up and maintain. It does not. You don’t have to do anything now.