> While keeping in mind that this isn't a field that I have a ton of practice in, I can confidently assert that a parser for HTML input that outputs CSS classnames does not need all of the following:
This is kind of an example of the Dunning Krueger curve. You’re admitting naivety while also claiming confidence, which should give pause.
The main issue I have with your argument is the framing - you’re trying to make your build tool as simple as possible to a developer like yourself which is not who the tools were built for or by. Context matters. Not everything is designed to work on 15 year old hardware and most developers would simply scoff at an engineer who thinks the best way to build software is with ancient hardware.
If you view everything as trying to use as little dependencies as possible (like a C programmer should) then you absolutely will think it’s bananas that this used 100 MB of dependencies. But if you have a different perspective, you may see that the dependencies don’t matter that much as long as it works.
In fact, by using common tools that have good interoperability, that are only used on a developer machine, it doesn’t matter too much what resources they use. Of course if you’re developing on a 2010 laptop with 16Gb of RAM then you may have issues but that’s not the open source developers problem. If all the open source developers had to fit your performance constraints then they would just not get much work done at all.
My main point is that developer tools don’t have to be light speed, they just have to be fast enough on modern hardware, which they absolutely are for frontend. I have enjoyed 3-5 second iterative builds on all my projects for the better part of 10 years.
> The main issue I have with your argument is the framing - you’re trying to make your build tool as simple as possible to a developer like yourself which is not who the tools were built for or by.
My argument is "Not all of the specified dependencies are necessary", and not "None of the specified dependencies are necessary".
See my other post, in which I point out that the functionality required could have been done in plain JS, using Node. That's exactly one dependency.
The other dependencies are not required to have the same feature, especially as you point out:
> My main point is that developer tools don’t have to be light speed, they just have to be fast enough on modern hardware
If we're both agreeing with that main point of yours, there is no reasonable justification for depending on anything other than Node (which is already there in the project anyway).
My PoV is less Dunning-Kreuger than you claimed; additional dependencies are added for no additional value, and come with breakages. After all
> But if you have a different perspective, you may see that the dependencies don’t matter that much as long as it works.
The whole point of the saga is that it doesn't work on an otherwise perfectly capable computer.
This is kind of an example of the Dunning Krueger curve. You’re admitting naivety while also claiming confidence, which should give pause.
The main issue I have with your argument is the framing - you’re trying to make your build tool as simple as possible to a developer like yourself which is not who the tools were built for or by. Context matters. Not everything is designed to work on 15 year old hardware and most developers would simply scoff at an engineer who thinks the best way to build software is with ancient hardware.
If you view everything as trying to use as little dependencies as possible (like a C programmer should) then you absolutely will think it’s bananas that this used 100 MB of dependencies. But if you have a different perspective, you may see that the dependencies don’t matter that much as long as it works.
In fact, by using common tools that have good interoperability, that are only used on a developer machine, it doesn’t matter too much what resources they use. Of course if you’re developing on a 2010 laptop with 16Gb of RAM then you may have issues but that’s not the open source developers problem. If all the open source developers had to fit your performance constraints then they would just not get much work done at all.
My main point is that developer tools don’t have to be light speed, they just have to be fast enough on modern hardware, which they absolutely are for frontend. I have enjoyed 3-5 second iterative builds on all my projects for the better part of 10 years.