Re:ZX Spectrum at 40: a look back
by noobermin on Saturday February 19, 2022 @02:57PM
(#30399989)
Nope, you're 100% on the money. I'm talking about any modern web app's dependencies and the mountain of tooling overhead, it's all so complicated it's hard to really understand completely.
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Every desktop browser can drop you into a full-blown, highly interactive IDE at the press of a button. It's far more capable than any 8-bitter ROM BASIC but just as accessible.
That's great, but most web apps aren't full-blown interactive IDEs, yet the usual dev approach uses the same extensive scaffolding and layering.
I'm talking about the IDE built into the browser. High-complexity tooling, etc is not some inherent property of programming-as-you-can-do-it-on-a-computer-today, just like the simple BASIC environments weren't the only way to program an 8 bit computer of yore. You could definitely make it much more complicated for yourself if you wanted or needed to.