Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

Re:Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling by intrasight on Sunday July 03, 2022 @02:04PM (#31969668)

Game-changer perhaps in a bad way ;) We're losing the art of writing solid code and instead flail with the "hot reload" crutch. I miss the days of punching cards and submitting a deck to be compiled and run - at least in terms of it forcing me to verify my work ahead of time.

And yes - I'm (mostly) kidding. But I did write my first programs on punched cards at a university course while I was still in grade school. Probably the last generation of programmers to experience that discipline.

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Re:Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling by nightski on Sunday July 03, 2022 @02:49PM (#31970006)

We are also writing far more complicated software. Punch cards didn’t have to support thousands of different devices, resolutions, screen densities, input methods, etc. It’s a totally different world.

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Re:Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling by crdrost on Sunday July 03, 2022 @03:38PM (#31970357)

That's totally fair but the tooling is still not where you'd like it.

In theory, there's no reason that you shouldn't be able to backtrace from the website to the filesystem. If you can do that, then your "it reloads every second" becomes even faster, it becomes WYSIWYG, you are writing in the live constantly-refreshing UI. Well, almost: your text editor has Undo and Git and your web browser doesn't. But we could build those into the browser. Heck, Redux is basically Git except without any standardized verbs, just give Redux some standardized verbs for tracking revisions in a living app and you've got everything you need.

If you follow that trend to its logical conclusion ("OK I want a special way to ctrl-click or right-click or something to edit the HTML of a component I see") you eventually get Smalltalk, and we're finally back as productive as we could be in the 70s :)

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