I'm sad JS needs a build step. The best build system is none at all IMHO. I'd love to see native support everywhere for typescript or other things we typically depend on a build for today.
>I'm sad JS needs a build step. The best build system is none at all IMHO.
Good news: JS doesn't need a build step. Modern webdev wants a build step mostly because it wants Javascript to feel more like a "serious" language. There are technical benefits to compiling to Javascript, most of which can be served by other means, but the unnecessary complexity of the Javascript ecosystem is mostly about gatekeeping and aesthetics and i will die on that hill.
>I'd love to see native support everywhere for typescript or other things we typically depend on a build for today.
Typescript is part of the problem. You can literally just accept Javascript for what it is - dynamically typed - and write it like any other scripting language.
Typescript is a solution to the jank-fucking-tastic type munging JS does (see: [1] About 1:20 in) and the problems that ensue.... if all you are doing is just making menus appear/disappear on click, by all means keep to JS.
The build steps/tooling are useful when you want to build actual applications rather than decorate a marketing page, and also when you need to support legacy browsers, being able to work with modern sensibilities and get code that'll work in IE11 is a blessing.
> the unnecessary complexity of the Javascript ecosystem is mostly about gatekeeping and aesthetics and i will die on that hill.
JS has much more of a "flavour of the week" problem than more mature ecosystems like PHP, I put that down to a relatively poor stdlib by comparison, rather than aesthetics or gatekeeping.
I'm with you in that a lot of TS use seems dogmatic or ritualistic today. I have a strong feeling in the near future we're going to see the bow string snap back and simple zero build, basic dynamic use of pure JS comes back in vogue.
TS is about readability and maintainability of code at scale. Having types helps immensely in understanding a new codebase and working in a large codebase with many other people.
The problem is Javascript has been entirely commoditized by enterprise, so solutions which should only be relevant to "code at scale" have become mandatory at any scale. You practically can't distribute a Javascript library without writing it in Typescript and submitting it to NPM, with the build step expected.
Yet writing even complex javascript without Typescript and having it work is still entirely possible, just as it is with other weakly typed languages. There should still be room for that, but the concept of simply writing javascript has become so alien it needs to be reintroduced as "vanilla javascript."
