tl;dr: Learning a new framework sucks, especially if that framework is written in JavaScript.

Dear god there is something absolutely screwed up about the JavaScript code ecosystem, I'll tell you what. If I had to put a finger on a root cause, naively I'd assume that few of the people writing code for JavaScript packages have written or worked in any large system not in JavaScript. Well, actually, I can imagine that they have worked in Ruby land. I'll amend that lemma to be "not in a compiled language, at any rate".

I've spent the majority of this week learning the React/Redux workflow as it's what we use on our webapp at Pluot. Generally speaking, the idea behind the architecture is pretty solid and can summed up thusly: keep all your state in one place, you filthy animal, and pub/sub/observe/notify any updates.

There. You now understand Redaxt.

Have you ever programmed anything in JavaScript? The language is so flexible as to be practically incoherent. Prototypes mean that any and everything is up for grabs at runtime which leads to some amazing flexibility and beautiful abstractions but also chaos and mayhem. There is good cause to complain about the release of a new 'JavaScript' framework -- the number of guarantees you have about the conceptual idioms of that framework are very limited. One side-effect of this is that JavaScript developers have the most finely tuned vocabulary for model-presenter-view you'll find anywhere, I guarantee it.

I'd like to recount for you the suffering I have been subjected to at the hands of the JavaScript ecosystem, as I've been learning how to Redaxt things this week.

Npm

I really have nothing much to say about npm as if you've ever used it you'll understand intuitively my point, but for those of you who have never used it, I will briefly explain the horror.

npm is a package manager for node, the JavaScript runtime that unleashed the horrors of mutability onto server side programming. It is as flakey as all fuck. The common advice for fixing weirdness with your program dependencies is to forcibly remove the entire cache of libraries and redownload them from the Internet whence they came. npm builds have a zero guarantee of repeatability, as the version of your dependencies is updated as published. Isn't that nice.

Webpack

JavaScript is great because it doesn't have a compiler but, sometimes, it's really nice to have a compiler. Also the JavaScript language cabal recently underwent a coup from the Ruby department, known more widely as ES6, and they needed a tool to patch over the ensuing chaos. Yes, more chaos than the normal amount of chaos that comes from an untyped, uncompiled, prototypical, dynamically functional language.

Webpack is the everyman's tool for transpiling your sugary, Ruby-ified JavaScript into something that average Joe Browser can understand. Yes, that is correct. State of the art JavaScript requires translation in order to be practically understood. Webpack does a lot of other things, like serving your pages locally, from memory while you're developing, re-writing output paths, copying your files into weird hard to find places, obfuscation in the most literal of senses, and more.

Given the correct flag, webpack will re"compile" your files when they're changed but I have yet to figure out what heuristic it's using to trigger a rebuild, given how randomly it actually works as intended. Your mileage may vary, but if you figure this out please someone let me know how it's supposed to work. To add insult to injury, the build output doesn't include anything so useful as a timestamp so that you can easily tell when the last time it deigned to run was.

Typos

You would think my shitty typing skills would be something I can't blame JavaScript for, but you'd be wrong. JavaScript has the incredibly dubious distinction of being one of those programming languages that you can make a typo in and not find out about it until you've "compiled" the project, refreshed the page and then attempted to click a button. You can mangle a variable name and nothing will happen, that nothingness being precisely the problem. Silent failures are the worst kind of failure. JavaScript has a fancy transpiler and really great[1] syntax but it can't tell when I've made a really obvious keymash. JavaScript is clearly the language of the futur.

Functional Programming Cargo Culted Fanfic, aka The Redux Docs

Here are a few curated selections:

• "It's very important that the reducer stays pure." like a virgin, until you touch it for the very first time. Or actually no, don't ever touch it because then it will not be pure and how could you do that to a function?

• "No surprises. No side effects. No API calls. No mutations. Just a calculation." asking for a boy to love him.

• "let's start writing our reducer by gradually teaching it to understand the actions we defined earlier", oh noble Pygmalion.

• "Redux will call our reducer ... for the first time. This is our chance...", your once in a lifetime opportunity!

• "Here is our code so far. It is rather verbose:" This statement was followed by the least verbose code I've seen. I do not understand what the word 'verbose' means to anyone in this universe.

• "we can split the reducers into separate files and keep them completely independent" as separate files are a recognized talismic barrier for keeping code from becoming logically entangled.

To be fair, once you get past the many rough edges, JavaScript is an entirely delightful language to write your own universe in. Redux/React is a fairly well thought out system for updating views and maintaining a centralized state mechanism, and I'll probably consider using it on my next JavaScript project.

Or maybe I'll just try Elm. I hear its compiler is very nice.

This post is dedicated to my friend Myk who can't remember the last time he did something that wasn't JavaScript.

[1] Great if you like syntactic sugar bullshit that is the opposite of readable.