Re:React I love you, but you're bringing me down
by sph on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @12:44AM
(#32920875)
I still remember the Parcel or Prettier saga. The first, the no-configuration bundler, the other, the no-configuration opinionated code formatter.
Then, for their next big major release, the big feature was adding configuration to make it even more powerful!
I haven't used them in a while so my memory might be hazy, but this is exactly the phenomenon you've described. I wonder if it's insecurity or trying to please the crowd that simple niche tools in the frontend end up being configurability behemoths. There's always a time in a JS library where someone decides to rewrite the whole thing and add plugin support, and that's the time that library goes to shit.
Over long enough time you get Webpack, with more knobs than the Linux kernel, and cycles back to a version that tries to be smart and not require any configuration anymore, like 1.0 did.
Then, for their next big major release, the big feature was adding configuration to make it even more powerful!
I haven't used them in a while so my memory might be hazy, but this is exactly the phenomenon you've described. I wonder if it's insecurity or trying to please the crowd that simple niche tools in the frontend end up being configurability behemoths. There's always a time in a JS library where someone decides to rewrite the whole thing and add plugin support, and that's the time that library goes to shit.
Over long enough time you get Webpack, with more knobs than the Linux kernel, and cycles back to a version that tries to be smart and not require any configuration anymore, like 1.0 did.