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Comment by uryga | Hacker News Reader

> the Third Age is about clearing away legacy assumptions and collapsing layers of tooling.

i feel like the bit about "clearing away legacy assumptions" wasn't substantiated very well – basically just "CommonJS isn't necessary anymore because ES Modules are a thing now". which is true, but i feel like a sweeping statement like that needs a bit more. and if that assumption is where other "legacy assumptions" stem from, it'd be nice to expand on it a bit

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My take is that we're never going to see ES Modules in the wild in web apps as we know them today, outside of some tutorials or open source apps. There's too strong business incentives to the contrary, legitimate or not.

Business incentives like supporting Internet Explorer for clients $$$?

Obfuscation. If web app companies could, they'd send your browser a binary instead of HTML and JS.

wasm will give them everything they want in that department.

isn't minification good enough at obfuscating the code? what does CommonJS add here?

(that's a legit question – i've sifted through webpacked JS a few times, and it mostly just added a bunch of

  (function(module, require, ...) {
     <your module here>
  })(...)

around the code. tedious to read, but not much in the way obfuscation)

and i guess if ES Modules turned out to be more performant (bc the module stuff is handled by native browser code, or maybe some HTTP/2 magic with loading), that could be an incentive for adoption

I've combed through minified JS a number of times. Not enough if you want to prevent someone from going through your shit.

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