I've written JS professionally for probably 12 or 13 out of the last 22 years, but I skipped the first couple iterations of frontend bundlers and tooling (kept rocking it old-school and just including plain .js files with script tags) until React, so I seem to have missed that intermediate phase, and now I cannot find it. I've lost probably 3 to 4 hours to trying to figure this out, last couple times I looked.
npx esbuild index.js --bundle --sourcemap --minify --outfile=out.js --format=esm
npx should download and run the binary for you and npx is almost always installed with node automatically.
When I have to use build-tools I usually go for esbuild.
Uh what? It's literally the name itself "node"_modules, it's designed to be used with node. The fact that it use same language and can later be used by browser is another matter. Thankfully we can easily bundle the whole thing using webpack nowadays.
There are also countless boilerplate project with webpack setup already so you can get reference from there.
That’s the problem. It’s not JavaScript. It’s not any part of the ECMA standard, it doesn’t work in runtimes other than node (read: the browser) yet it lives in the .js files making them not truly JavaScript. You have split the language.
The syntax isn’t part of the language and was designed in such a way that it cannot be polyfilled. This lead to a thousand packagers that would not be necessary at all if a sane syntax had been chosen. The creator of node himself has said making node incompatible with the browser was one of his biggest mistakes.
https://medium.com/@imior/10-things-i-regret-about-node-js-r...
> There are also countless boilerplate project with webpack setup already so you can get reference from there.
That’s literally the other problem! People just copying boilerplate without understanding it. That’s not a proper solution. That’s not a maintainable project, that’s copying other peoples homework and getting yourself in over your head.
Well I can understand it. As I've used the previous generation of jQuery, knockout, etc, nodejs and it's tooling makes things easier to scale, even with bigger overhead cost.
EDIT:
> That’s literally the other problem! People just copying boilerplate without understanding it. That’s not a proper solution. That’s not a maintainable project, that’s copying other peoples homework and getting yourself in over your head.
Copy, make it run well, modify, learn is how I learn things. Without working example, it's magnitude times harder to learn something. The fact that people copy and use without trying to understand things is their fault, not the hundreds of boilerplate code.
Most of my code today is very straightforward, start a project, add type: module and 90% of the packages will work. If it doesn't, I either pick one of the 1M+ alternatives, try to decipher the issue (often is changing the import format or entrypoint), or avoid using a package for the problem I was trying to solve if trivial enough.
Node modules are just a reaction to the actual original sin, which is building a popular language that essentially had no standard library. I suppose that's the kind of thing that will happen when you have to build one in a matter of weeks, but everything from webpack to left_pad is essentially the fault of the language not having a standard library.
Moving javascript out of the browser and trying to use it as a one-size-fits-all replacement for everything from systems to application programming, and every language from C++ to Java, is the original sin. Stop complaining because Brendan Eich's toy scripting language isn't a good replacement for things it was never meant to be used for. A screwdriver isn't a good hammer, either.
I have no particular love for using JS as a language to power everything from IoT devices to web servers, but it doesn't really matter how I feel about it. It's not going anywhere.
Why should the language provide that? What other languages provide an equivalent to that? left_pad is intended for formatting text within a terminal, not a website. There's no need for it within the context of a website, because HTML has tables, CSS and other elements for that.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-pad.php
https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.1/String.html
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsstrin...
> left_pad is intended for formatting text within a terminal, not a website. There's no need for it within the context of a website
This is just not correct. It’s for padding a string with any character, for example adding leading zeroes to a number for display purposes. There are plenty of reasons to want to do that in a browser.
My code is a combo of lodash bits, datefns, helper regexes I’ve curated over the years, etc
Is there a standard library-like package that you import on most projects?
Nothing ever works like a sane person would expect. When I do get a working typescript + webpack setup it’s almost entirely by accident. I stumbled upon something that works? Just avoid touching it at all costs.
Recently I wanted to load an AMD module in Deno and just about gave my self an aneurism before giving up hours later.
I have worked in dozens of languages over my career, and not encountered as much of a clusterf*ck as JavaScript anywhere else. I have never worked with anything before where so few people had any idea how it actually worked and just prayed that it continues.