If any of the frameworks glorified on HN were subject to the same scrutiny as Rails, Github would need a suicide hotline.
I've recently had the pleasure of working on a new, medium-sized node/react project. Now I was new to a lot of the technology, but I've learned a few and would think I have some experience.
It probably took me a week to get webpack running the way I wanted. The documentation is an atrocious mix of stuff that is outdated (older than 6 months) and stuff that's too new (webpack 2.0) without any indication as to the validity. There're six different ways to get hot reloading/replacement to work, with similar problems. The configuration's syntax is heavily influenced by brainfuck with a /\w/[{\[]/s thrown in for good measure. As a soothing measure, webpack doesn't complain about anything but parse errors with the configuration. The version I was using came with 12 different options to render source maps, none of which worked in chrome (since fixed).
And that's just the linker. I actually had presets to search for, i. e. ["express.js" from:<date-of-last-stable-release> to:<date-of-following-alpha/beta-release>]. node_modules once managed to consume 4TB of hd space (someone managed to create a circular dependency) and even in regular use gets to the point where I'm looking for the elasticsearch plugin for ls *<x>. If you have checkouts of several versions or projects, each one will have it's own version of left_pad & friends at around 230MB (just checked with a clean install of mxstbr/react-boilerplate) with no way of deduplication.
I enjoy playing with new technology (currently elm & swift) but I know that it's time "joyfully wasted" right now and don't try to justify it. There's no amount of type-safety bugs that could cost as much time as a new framework's kinks.
I've recently had the pleasure of working on a new, medium-sized node/react project. Now I was new to a lot of the technology, but I've learned a few and would think I have some experience.
It probably took me a week to get webpack running the way I wanted. The documentation is an atrocious mix of stuff that is outdated (older than 6 months) and stuff that's too new (webpack 2.0) without any indication as to the validity. There're six different ways to get hot reloading/replacement to work, with similar problems. The configuration's syntax is heavily influenced by brainfuck with a /\w/[{\[]/s thrown in for good measure. As a soothing measure, webpack doesn't complain about anything but parse errors with the configuration. The version I was using came with 12 different options to render source maps, none of which worked in chrome (since fixed).
And that's just the linker. I actually had presets to search for, i. e. ["express.js" from:<date-of-last-stable-release> to:<date-of-following-alpha/beta-release>]. node_modules once managed to consume 4TB of hd space (someone managed to create a circular dependency) and even in regular use gets to the point where I'm looking for the elasticsearch plugin for ls *<x>. If you have checkouts of several versions or projects, each one will have it's own version of left_pad & friends at around 230MB (just checked with a clean install of mxstbr/react-boilerplate) with no way of deduplication.
I enjoy playing with new technology (currently elm & swift) but I know that it's time "joyfully wasted" right now and don't try to justify it. There's no amount of type-safety bugs that could cost as much time as a new framework's kinks.