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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

As an integrated environment to get going quickly on a large-scale single page app this looks nice. I'm wondering though who this is suited for. An experienced web developer who has a few frameworks under their belt will have a preferred toolbox, and likely won't be interested. Meanwhile, a beginner will have a really steep learning curve figuring all these tools out at the same time, instead of one by one, and I suspect will fall off the mountain before they reach the summit. I suppose this toolbox is best suited for the mid-level, experienced enough to know some of the tools, but not so experienced as to have decided which tools they want.

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That's actually where a large group of developers fall as well. You have the total beginners, who realistically won't build an app that has tests, or use a framework to sort out their models and views etc. They just need a HTML, CSS, JS file and some comments and can throw together something simple.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the experts, who have evaluated a dozen frameworks of their own, know why they like gulp more than broccoli, and really just need an API reference to know what's possible, and off they go.

And in the middle of all this you have the huge group of developers who would really like to have some more help, even if only to help them make decisions of their own and eventually get them over the hump to expert-level. That's the group this is targeted at.

If you make a client-side app with it and figure out you don't like certain pieces of the toolbelt, you can replace them on the spot (they're loosely coupled). If at some point you're so advanced you want to replace it all, fantastic! You don't need our help anymore :)

You're right on the money. I think people who already know their tools well and have a system that works are covered and are NOT the target audience.

In the future I'd like to sort of ween new users into using recroom by abstracting away a lot of things (we are largely proxying to other commands in grunt/yeoman right now, but the user doesn't need to know these tools to use recroom at a very basic level).

But for me, I feel like an intermediate/experienced developer who has just always wanted an end-to-end idiomatic way to write apps without me knowing all the tools inside-out. I'm hoping recroom will be that most of all, so you're right :-)

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