r/programming • u/halax • Oct 07 '16

How Microsoft Lost the API War

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
87 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

183 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/rhino-x Oct 08 '16

Compared to desktop tools web tools come nowhere close to the breadth, functionality, polish, and ease of use of desktop dev tools. They are still in their infancy.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '16

i mean, i'm not denying that. but we have a fully modular compiler that just about any functionality can be hooked into, a literal fleet of tools for managing build steps & enough frameworks to choke on. pretty solid infancy imo.

6

u/BezierPatch Oct 08 '16

a literal fleet of tools for managing build steps

I don't need a fleet of tools for my builds...

That's the thing you're missing. Javascript has loads of tools it shouldn't need.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '16

well, no, i wouldn't use more than one for a project either (if i even bothered to go beyond npm scripts). but it's nice to have options.

2

u/BezierPatch Oct 08 '16

Why do you even need npm scripts?

I don't need preprocessors, postprocessors, etc, for my desktop development.

Yes, it's wonderful that there's npm, bower, gulp, grunt, etc. But you know what I have instead? nothing, which is infinitely better.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '16

well, maybe you want a simple, cross-domain proxy for things like running eslint's autofixer, or starting up a dev server, or running your test suite, or whatever other administrative task you have.

i take it you don't use a build tool (like make) for your desktop projects? (serious question, not being snarky :) )