Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating
I&#x27;ve said it before here and I&#x27;ll say it again: the JS ecosystem is moving in the wrong direction.<p>Sometimes I feel that with Javascript, we developers have taken something that wasn&#x27;t ours, and we&#x27;re in the process of destroying the best thing there ever was about it.<p>One of its best qualities used to be that you could have absolutely no idea what you&#x27;re doing, read a few bad tutorials somewhere on the web, mash your head onto the keyboard and end up with something horrifying that was nevertheless close to what you wanted to achieve. It was beautiful, egalitarian. Like the web is supposed to be.<p>I&#x27;ve spent quite a bit of time on Stackoverflow, coaching people who you would not call developers (nor would they themselves) on how to do that one tiny thing they wanted to add to the site for their bakery, yoga studio or blog. And almost got it working themselves. I know of no other language that can tell a similar success story, with that high an impact.<p>Just insert that &lt;script&gt; for that jQuery plugin here and modify that initializer over there with a vague understand of how it needs to be adapted to your situation. Voilà!<p>But we couldn&#x27;t let that stand, could we? Because what works for Alice and Bob doesn&#x27;t work for somebody writing that 200.000 line image editor or CRM in JS, and let&#x27;s face it, that&#x27;s what the web is about.<p>So here we are, the single &lt;script&gt; tag having been replaced with compilers, transpilers, five mutually incompatible build systems, three different module systems in God knows how many implementations, frameworks changing their API every ten minutes and five thousand lines of NPM module code to be installed for even the simplest of tasks.<p>We did it, gals and guys! The web is safely back in the hands of full-time professionals (with Hindu cow-like frustration tolerance). Where it belongs.<p>Bah.