Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?
Look, I’m in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren’t “make my website prettier!” feels very much like a bunch of “webmasters” dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren’t looking and rebranding as “developers” whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.
Well I see huge benefits in building the tools used by a community with the technology this community masters. IMO the Python’s stdlib sucks because it’s written in C which is a huge barrier to entry.
But I think it’s a good example of the compromise that has to be made here : what’s the best fitting technology vs. how to ensure easy onboarding for future contributors.
Honestly those usecases described here shouldn’t have been done in js in the first place.
Look, I’m in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren’t “make my website prettier!” feels very much like a bunch of “webmasters” dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren’t looking and rebranding as “developers” whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.
I agree.
I’m noticing this species has a problem with doing things the obviously correct way the first time.
It’s as though we’d rather put 100x more effort for 10% of the results just to prove that we “can” do it.
Well I see huge benefits in building the tools used by a community with the technology this community masters. IMO the Python’s stdlib sucks because it’s written in C which is a huge barrier to entry.
Not all of the stdlib is written in C. Some parts cannot be Python because it’s critical code that needs to be as fast as possible.
Python is already slow for many use cases, if the standard lib was all built in Python it would be just too slow for much more use cases.
I didn’t mean it’s a bad choice !
But I think it’s a good example of the compromise that has to be made here : what’s the best fitting technology vs. how to ensure easy onboarding for future contributors.