vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist

zip's bf

no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good


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bluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA

I think I've said this before but one of my least favorite things about the javascript ecosystem is how every project of any reasonably large size requires you to use a bunch of components called like florb and grumbo and jex, and none of them have documentation that actually describes how they work. you just get like a tool called create-grumbo-app and a github repo called florb-examples with a folder called with-jex and you have to piece those together into a working application that uses all three.


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in reply to @vogon's post:

this is one of those things that I haven't experienced in javascript stuff. I'm sure it happens pretty often, but I've only heard about it in other language package ecosystems

absolutely happens with node versions and gyp modules though. "oh, you're on a later node version? well, we don't have a binary for you so here, let this compile for 30 minutes spewing a bunch of warnings and it just ends with "not ok."

My favorite example of this is “no part of the docker website will tell you what docker is, or what it does, or what it’s for”

(they’ve improved it a bit in the past few years, so this isn’t quite as funny as it used to be, although it’s still mostly true lol)

heads up that nobody uses grumbo anymore because yagrump is cooler, the latest version of jex won't compile if you're using anything later than 0.14.3 of grumbo, but also they don't fix the botnet exploit in grumbo until 1.08.4 so idk have fun maintaining things or whatever

It's terrible and I have some hypotheses around it mostly revolving around:

  • JS having no standard library to speak of so without installing eleventy million bespoke packages it doesn't do anything
  • Community standards set by rando webdevs who never learned how to function in a dev team so even the lousy state of documentation for most open source projects is beyond what they ever learned you needed to do

9 times out of 10 the websites for all these projects are completely inscrutable to anyone who doesn't already know about them, containing zero information about what the project is, what it does, or who its intended users are, eg "Pablo is an AEP variant of Wimbli for POSIX, based on Kloob and focused mainly on concurrency and Raditz compliance".

gotta build that jargon moat around the field to ensure job security!

When I have to go through this experience, I sometimes think back to the moment in Myst where you find the two brothers in the books and how they're howling, looking confused, shouting names, and squinting moments before dissipating into the aether.

Then the little video clips repeats.

Want to use React? Great!

But for starters don't worry about Webpack, babel, latest ECMAScript standards, Typescript, Redux, prettier, eslint, mocha/jest, sinon, axios, lodash, etc etc

It's fineeeeeeeeeee

🙃

(Oh and by the way don't worry about functional components, just use classes! It's great!)

🙃🙃🙃