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**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, let's talk a little bit about tooling. Gina Trapani wrote a good article explaining modern JavaScript for ancient web developers, which I'm realizing I actually fall into the category of now... And I think you two too do as well, so this is probably not the best panel to talk about this... \... |
**Alex Sexton:** Speaking of tools, Mikeal... \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[24:03\] That's brutal... |
**Alex Sexton:** ...how do you feel about the explosion of them? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yeah... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I love tools. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, so I'll run a real thing that happened to me by you all, and you can tell me if you agree or not. I was curious about something that was going on in Yarn... In particular, we had this issue where we were thinking about adding an install step into Node Core for npm packages, then I went "Oh, Yar... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yup. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Do I need to be put out to pasture? Is this the new reasonable thing to do? |
**Alex Sexton:** I mean, you mentioned those tools like they all do the same thing, but they don't. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** They don't, but it's a command line utility. Are they really necessary? |
**Alex Sexton:** Well, if you want to write code that is type checked, then you can; you don't have to, but they chose to, because it'll make their command line tool better for some reason for them. Then if you want to write in ES6 or whatever, and still work in older versions of Node, which is a requirement for them, ... |
I don't see a problem... My favorite response to that is just like "It still works without all that stuff." If you want to personally write all your scripts by hand, using only VARs and ES3 prototype methods, that also is compatible and you can do that. But forcing your idea of a baseline of tools on people seems arbit... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, first of all I'll argue a little bit with that notion that you can't use modern JavaScript features and support older versions of Node... You should not be supporting 0.10 or 0.12. Those are literally not even getting security fixes anymore, so it's detrimental to your community to support it. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah, but that's very idealist. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, it's not idealistic, it's actually practical. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** But for a company, it isn't. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Especially if you're a company. You are literally not going to get critical security fixed anymore. Like, that's gone. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Right, but I'll give you a real-time example. Elizabeth & Clarke - my wife's company - has one engineer, and what he works on depends on the time, and I'd rather have him work on mission-critical business stuff than him catching up to date, because we're literally a three-person company. So it ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** But this is a false dichotomy. If you've got some stuff up in 0.12 and you don't wanna upgrade it, fine. But you're also not gonna get the newest Yarn installer either. Like... No. You're not gonna get the newest dependency and have that support these ancient versions. You either aren't updating this... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[27:59\] If you put out a competitor to npm and npm has a set of version that it works on, and you don't work on and you don't work on those versions, then you instantly are at a disadvantage. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** New versions of npm do not work with 0.12 and 0.10. |
**Alex Sexton:** They do. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, they don't. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Terminal challenge. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No... New, new versions don't work with 0.10 and 0.12. |
**Alex Sexton:** Fine... But they did two weeks ago. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Do we have a live fact checker? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** If they are still working with them, I'm gonna yell at Isaac tomorrow, that's what I'll do. I think that we honestly owe it to ourselves as a community to push people in the direction of actually being secure and not being open to huge security vulnerabilities, and part of that is pushing the off of ... |
**Alex Sexton:** I am aware of security vulnerability landscapes, but there is a different vector, there is a different amount of possibility of security problems when you're talking about a build tool versus a runtime application. So if you only use Node as a build tool, which I think is a massive portion of the way p... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Huge. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, like half or more, it feels like... The amount of security vulnerabilities that you have are vastly reduced, and the need to upgrade versions of Node on your Jenkins server is much lower than if you run Node in production, serving requests and things like that. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, that was a really bad example, because we've had to upgrade Jenkins because of Jenkins' security vulnerabilities like twice a year, so... Yeah, sorry... You hit my sore spot with Jenkins, it's awful... Awful, awful software! |
**Alex Sexton:** Man, I feel like we're about two levels off of the actual discussion here, though... So I'm not talking about upgrading Node... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Cause like because being a manager and having the chance to only write JavaScript in my free time, every time -- I said I have a random side project, and I'm like "Okay, I'm gonna try out Flow." I wanna learn a little bit about this type-checking stuff, because I think I've come to the point wh... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** This is an interesting topic, because a lot of the people who advocate for these tools say that it's actually lowering the barrier to entry. These tools add a bunch of value that makes programming easier, and another set of people (which I think we're representing here) are saying "No, it's a bigger ... |
At no point in time does this tooling become entirely universal, right? Not even all frontend developers are using this exact toolchain; there are other competing toolchains out there, even for the frontend stuff. |
**Alex Sexton:** I think there's two discussions here. If you expose an API that you document, that has nothing to do with Webpack, Gulp, Flow or whatever else you mentioned, and you use those tools to build that library or API, then use a thousand tools if that's what makes you productive and that's what you wanna do,... |
\[32:06\] If you are leaking out those abstractions from outside, then I agree with you - you're forcing people to learn it. But if you just wanna pull in a tool like Yarn, it'll maybe build all that stuff, but to use Yarn, you just "npm install --global yarn", and then you can use Yarn. It doesn't matter that they use... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a really good distinction, actually. That is a really good distinction. I didn't care about what Yarn was built in until I wanted to look at the code for some reason, which means that I'm not the normal user of that software. But to Juan's point, when you wanted to go and use Flow, it wasn't l... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I was trying to get it with Babel. I basically had an existing project that I wanted to bring in, but I was also using AVA, the test-runner, so it already had a config... It was just very weird. I finally got it to work, but then I was just not encouraged enough to actually try it out, so I jus... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You literally got it set up to learn it, and you were like "I'm burned out now." \[laughs\] |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I was literally frustrated, because I could have spent my Saturday working on my bot, but I couldn't. |
**Alex Sexton:** You could... You chose to try to install something that was hard to install. Nothing forced you to try to use Flow. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** My curiosity... |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure, but it's an experiment for a reason. Some experiments that you try are gonna fail, and that's part of the deal, but I guess it's an amortized cost. I agree that there's some overhead to learning some of these tools, but if you spend the day (I guess that's what it took you to be able to hook Babe... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I'm exaggerating, but like four hours. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I would give you more than that... It can be hard. I would definitely encourage any new developers to always use a starter kit for these types of things. Go find a React, Redux, Flow, Babel starter kit; that exists, you can go get it, you install it and you run it, and it immediately has all thes... |
You're gonna tackle that problem slightly differently, 1) because you are a pretty experienced developer and you assume that you should be able to just pull something in and it'll work pretty easily... But for new developers, I think there actually are quite a few tools that can make this instant and nice, without them... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Oh, right... Don't get me wrong, the return on investment - it was attractive enough for me to spend a day trying to figure it out, because it's an awesome thing. I think a lot of these tools have ultimately maybe a better developer, and not even having any formal computer science training, the... |
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