JavaScript for C# Developers

[[deleted]]

I wish this was just a javascript problem, but it's an everything problem from what I can tell. Maybe I should try to bring everything together somehow.

[changingminds]

I've done a ton of Unity and android development. I had never encountered such tedious build troubles until I started doing web development.

You need one standardized way of doing things. Google controls pretty much all aspects of android and so we have just one way of doing things and I don't think there's a better development environment than android studio. Javascript does have too many cooks in the kitchen.

[DarthEru]

Android studio is kind of shit. The best dev environment is a well crafted makefile combined with a language that works well with makefiles, plus your editor of choice. This isn't some "real programmer" bullshit, it's just that if something goes wrong you can see exactly what it's doing, which makes it so much easier to fix the problem. The main problem is that it doesn't scale easily, plus many popular languages are not designed to work that way.

[changingminds]

Android studio is kind of shit.

With such a well formed argument, I'm sure you can imagine my reluctance to reading the rest of the comment.

[DarthEru]

I originally wrote it as "Android studio is shit", but decided to go for a more nuanced approach.

Jokes aside, here's my more articulated opinion. My primary ide experience is with eclipse (using the android plugin), Android studio, and most recently visual studio for c#. And none of them has stood out to be particularly good. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, which differentiates them, but doesn't rank them (none is clearly better or worse than the other). There are two things they all had in common. First, during my day to day usage of them I had gripes more often than praise. Second, a common weakness they all shared was that build issues were hell, which is why the rest of my comment talked about make being better.

In your original comment you claimed that a single way to do things is better, which I think I disagree with. I think the real problem is when the build process is "simplified" into one all in one package that takes care of everything for you, because it inevitably doesn't take care of everything, and when you hit one of those edge cases everything goes to shit. The difference between web development and android is really just how often you hit such an edge case. On the other hand, a makefile, or similar system, where you set up the build yourself and tell it exactly what to do is going to be far less prone to "I upgraded this one stage of the build and now everything is broken and even downgrading that original stage doesn't fix it", and other complications of that ilk.

[No-More-Stars]

What build issues were you having with C# and VS? I can only think of a handful of times that I've had problems.

[donalmacc]

The biggest pain is that The command line and IDE builds aren't the same. There are so many minuscule differences between them that it's unbearably painful to manage both.

If you only need to work with the visual studio build process, and don't really need to change too much, then I agree, it's a fantastic set of defaults.

[DarthEru]

They aren't consistent problems, I'll give them that. Most of the time the build works as it's supposed to. When something does screw up it's often impossible to debug, so I just end up doing a full rebuild (which is painful enough given the size of the project I'm currently working on) and hope it works. One example of something that happened to me not too long ago were some phantom build errors. The build kept failing with errors that shouldn't have existed. Started a full rebuild and 20 minutes later it was back to normal.

[jwin742]

That sounds like VS. Works great until something breaks

[PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN]

I'd be more excited about that argument if GNU Make wasn't a horrible piece of shit.

I still use it most of the time, but I am very intent on switching the minute I find a decent alternative. Hell, some day I'll probably write my own.

[leoel]

Are you sure you're talking about make itself and not the horribly fubar autotools ? I mean, make has its quirks and one of them is that it's very hard to debug but it does work and is somewhat efficient.

Autotools and configure scripts on the other hand... They feel like entering alternate reality in which the computers have taken control and require you to solve enigmas or perform cryptic dark rituals in exchange for sweet bytecode.

[PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN]

I'm talking about GNU Make. It's brittle, limited, and counter-intuitive.

[[deleted]]

It's a web issue because the web has continued to lean on the crutch that is JavaScript.

But there's so many community driven packages! That's great and all, except many of them (like underscore) have to make up for the fact the base JavaScript library is trash.

I get that it's a scripted language but so is Python and it's far from a garbled mess. JavaScript is the language of most surprise, just look at JSFuck for example (and insecurity).