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The audacity to be nostalgic for Eclipse!
Every time I read something like this it comes to mind that we’re more likely to remember the good bits of the past than the struggles. People use containers because the “works on my machine” problem was a constant pain.
You can still ship code into production quickly if you pair program and commit to trunk to bypass the code review process, and have a CI/CD pipeline set up to automatically build and publish the package.
And I’d much rather have a cloud env pull my code and automatically deploy something than manually transfer files over FTP.
Good write up. I agree with several points
And it pains me too that everything is damn electron. Can we please go back to writing stuff that doesn’t require that?
I don’t mind an old style interface. Hell, in many cases I’ll welcome it with open arms. Modern UI is not necessarily better. Both tech wise and also style wise.
I started programming in 2015 and I’m very surprised that webapps have managed to get worse in that time period. We have 10 years of work on the V8, 10 years of React and Angular, 10 years of DX improvements and my current work is C# takes a minute to compile and Angular takes 4 minutes for a production build.
I know now we have TS and there’s a lot of safety that comes with it but somehow things are just slow, both building and on deployed websites. Websites should be snappy when everyone has a GPU that can go incredibly fast compared to 10 years ago and cores that are 2x faster and 4x as numerous.
well there is some Rust building up under that JavaScript… maybe that can save us.
Rust isn’t built for the same purpose as JavaScript though. What do you mean?
Their primary purpose certainly isn’t the same, but with JavaScript being used to implement text editors, it’s in a playing field where many would argue that Rust is better suited.
Well, and Rust can play in JavaScript’s playing field, too: You can implement webpages in HTML+CSS+Rust by going through WebAssembly.
Fair point.
I miss the days when it was simpler as well. Back before there were botnets with hundreds of thousands of compromised routers across several countries that could send tens of terabytes per second of data to your server for a sustained period of time. Back before there were thousands of bots crawling every IP and domain imaginable for exposed, abusable ports and wp-admin endpoints. Back before people started to compete in how many 9s of uptime they supported (before killing that all with LLMs anyway).
Sadly, we can’t go back to those times. Doing so with a production service would not end well.
The issue is not npm. Npm is a solution to a problem, even if it isn’t perfect.
The issue is we live in a different landscape.
Eclipse was great, having used it in the past, but its features are not exclusive to Eclipse. I can do the same inlining and extracting of code in vscode with code actions. The compile times weren’t seconds for me in the past, but they are for me now. Vite helps that even more (though that’s comparing JS to Java).
Great write up!
Of course, I never stopped editing my code in
viso I missed some of the editor frustrations.
