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Comment by vikingcaffiene | Hacker News Reader

Seeing a lot of hate here for modern JS workflows. The truth is you can make a mess no matter what ecosystem you buy into. I’ve encountered some absolute trash fires of complexity in Java, PHP, C, and (yes) Javascript code bases. They all suffered from the same problem: lack of communication and planning. This is a framework agnostic problem IMHO.

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Different perspective: In Java, PHP and C (I've worked with each), comes very close to "no assembly required" to get a simple project running: install, write code, optionally compile and then run. In JS, unless you're doing vanilla JS, you need to select and bolt together a lot of different third party tooling first, or you have to use a boilerplate, of which there are many versions to choose from.

I see you've never developed in Java if you think that comes 'no assembly required".

definitely - having recently started working in Java it's far from "no assembly required" for certain things but feels _much_ more sane the types of problems I'd encounter in web/mobile dev land

> In JS, unless you're doing vanilla JS, you need to select and bolt together a lot of different third party tooling first, or you have to use a boilerplate, of which there are many versions to choose from.

That might have been true once but its not anymore. Assuming you have node installed, its a one liner to get started in React[0] and Angular[1].

I've found that many of the criticisms of the modern JS stack come from outdated views about the ecosystem (no offense intended). I'd encourage you to give it another try (especially TypeScript) It's matured quite a bit.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

[1] https://cli.angular.io/

Also as the user hliyan notes.... you don't have to do all that stuff.

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