JavaScript

`0:20:29`

than what they were in the '90s. So shouldn't we be able to work in even easier ways? We should be looking back on the '90s ago, like, oh, that was way too complicated. Now we have more sophisticated technology that's way faster and it allows us to work in these easier to use ways. But that's not true. But now you can see the line I draw in my work with Ruby on Rails, and especially with Rails 8. No build to me is reaching back to that '90s feeling and going, now we can do some of those things without giving up on all the progress. Because I do think you can get too nostalgic. I do think you can start just fantasizing that everything was better in the '90s. It wasn't. I mean, I was there. There was a lot of things that sucked. And if we can somehow find a way to combine the advantages and advances we've had over the past 20 years with that ease of developer ergonomics, we can win. No build is a rejection of the part of web development I've hated the most in the past 10, 15 years,

`0:21:32`

which is the JavaScript scene. And I don't say that as someone who hate JavaScript. I mean, I often joke that JavaScript. It's my second favorite program language. It's a very distant second. Ruby is by far and away number one, but I actually like JavaScript. I don't think it's a bad language. It gets a lot of flack. People add a string of two plus a one and it gives something nonsense. And I just go like, yeah, but why would you do that? Just don't do that. The language is actually quite lovely, especially the modern version. ES6 that really introduced a proper class syntax to it. So I could work with JavaScript in many of the same ways that I love working with Ruby made things so much better. But in the early 2010s until quite recently, all of that advancement happened in pre- processing, happened in built pipelines. The browsers couldn't speak a dialect of JavaScript that was pleasant to work with. So everyone started to pre-filing their JavaScript

`0:22:32`

to be able to use more modern ways of programming with a browser that was seen as stuck with an ancient version of JavaScript that no one actually wanted to work with. And that made sense to me, but it was also deeply unpleasant. And I remember thinking during that time, the dark ages, as I refer to them with JavaScript, that this cannot be the final destination. There's no way that we have managed to turn the internet into such an unpleasant place to work. Where I would start working on a project in JavaScript using webpack and all of these dependencies. And I would put it down for literally five minutes and the thing wouldn't compile anymore. The amount of churn that the JavaScript community, especially with its frameworks and its tooling went through in the decade from 2010 to 2020 was absurd. And you had to be trapped inside of that asylum to not realize what an utterly perverse situation