I don't understand what is so appealing about not having a build pipeline for JavaScript, other than the ability to very quickly test and learn things directly in the browser, which of course anyone can still do.

For anything remotely important, you're almost certainly going to already want a build pipeline to do things like concatenating/minifying code, running tests, and deploying. Adding a transpilation step to extend support to older browsers comes with almost no cost to time or maintainability, assuming you're using well-supported things like Babel and its official plugins.

The appealing thing about not having a build pipeline is not having it. Not having another thing to maintain and update/upgrade/debug. I've gone through grunt, gulp, webpack and parcel. Somewhere along the way I realized that with es6 imports and css variables I don't really need it.

I've talked with frontend devs who only worked on projects with build steps about this and they often seem perplexed and surprised by just how simple it can be if you don't make it complex.

Can you imagine a modern SoundCloud, Spotify, Facebook, Airbnb or Slack without a build pipeline? There's nothing appealing about that.

It's nice and simple for small projects but let's not act like putting a script tag in HTML is some divine wisdom that newbies don't understand.

Yes I can. All of those except for facebook (because facebook is a sprawling platform) seem reasonable to be able to build without a build system. And with using es6 modules it's not "putting a script tag in HTML", you have a proper module loading system without needing any builds or libs.

I'm not saying it's some sort of lost knowledge like Damascus steel, I'm just saying that many people these days are so caught up into the current dogma of JS that they never consider a simpler but still modern path.

> Adding a transpilation step to extend support to older browsers comes with almost no cost to time or maintainability

They may be simple concepts, but there's definitely still an added cost with transpilation and minification steps.

If you work with Babel long enough you'll encounter scenarios where the transpiling didn't quite work as expected and breaks in-browser.

When you're debugging minified code in-browser using source maps, it's not all that uncommon to get different line numbers and stack traces than you get when loading up the original unminified source. I can recall a number of occasions where I had to deploy unminified source for in-browser debugging because the source maps were obfuscating the real error.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

I'm using Webpack + Babel... but literally only for features after async/await. All major, current browsers support it. That's the baseline support for the apps I'm working on now.

The payload to fill promises, regenerator and async are huge, and without them, my payload is significantly smaller. for preset-env...

      {
        loose: true,
        modules: false,
        useBuiltIns: 'usage',
        corejs: 3,
        targets: {
          browsers: ['edge 15', 'safari 10.1', 'chrome 58', 'firefox 52', 'ios 10.3'],
        },
        exclude: ['transform-async-to-generator', 'transform-regenerator'],
      },

from here, I only need the features not part of stage 4 that I want to add. I have the following in a test script...

    try {
      eval('(function() { async _ => _; })();');
      if (typeof fetch === 'undefined') throw new Error('no fetch');
    } catch (e) {
      window.location.replace('/auth/legacy.html');
    }

With async functions, and fetch api available, you get a LOT in the box.

I have no concerns about having a build pipeline per se. My concern is that it's still way too complex and difficult. I think it could be made to be much simpler for 90 percent of cases, while still maintaining optional complexity for the remaining 10 percent of cases that need it.

>I don't understand what is so appealing about not having a build pipeline for JavaScript

We don't have one at my work (Fortune 100 company), but it has nothing to do with whether it is appealing or not. It has to do with the projects we are working on started years before there was any such thing as a build pipeline in the web world and it's not pragmatic to add one in at this point. Maybe some decade we will get the budget to start over from scratch (haha!) and get modern things like a build pipeline.

I agree in broad terms, but as a counterpoint, those build pipelines are being created and used primarily by folks who initially learned by handwriting javascript.

While less of a consideration for established teams, it dramatically raises the barrier to entry for those who are learning as well as those who currently have much simpler requirements. Those are the future members of that established team. Adding hurdles to the process of learning will, in the long run, result in a smaller, more homogeneous pool of experienced developers to draw upon. It's a self-perpetuating cycle - making folks learn by using complex build scripts will result in experienced developers who then create further complexity because they've self-selected to be those who happen to think in that mode.

That's not intended to suggest that progress is bad. Rather that it's a bit short-sighted of us, as an industry, not to consider the ramifications of enforcing a workflow that happens to be trivial from the limited perspective of long time front end developers.

{ Edit to try to make the last paragraph sound less accusatory. Sorry! That wasn't my intention. }

There are tools like create-react-app that configure complicated build pipelines for you, and there's parcel, a simple common-case build pipeline.

Again, just for the sake of playing Devil's Advocate, the fact that we rely entirely upon such helpers (and the overwhelming number of mutually exclusive options available) is a potential indicator that we're making it more complex than we have to[1].

The syntactic sugar that we're adding to make our own jobs easier is arguably making things disproportionately more difficult for anyone who doesn't already have the same baseline level of knowledge. That includes those who are trying to learn to do our jobs after we've all moved on. That would notably have also included all of us, earlier in our careers.

I'm just suggesting that it's worth considering whether that seems sustainable in the long run.

[1] ... for relatively simple tasks. Complex tooling happens to be a very good tool for complex tasks, like the sort of professional work that you seem to be referring to. No matter how good our hammer may be, however, not every task always wants to be a nail. create-react-app and parcel are examples of excellent hammers.

The main complex task that's being addressed is making JavaScript that runs on a variety of browsers, not just the latest Firefox.

I'm afraid I don't know what you have in mind as far as syntactic sugar that makes things harder for learners. Every new syntax I can think of makes JS easier to learn and use.

The biggest issue I've seen with these is that at some point they do break and then you need a knowledgeable person to fix it. The pipeline is basically a black box unless you possess the knowledge of how all the parts work and interact with each other.

I dunno how to put this in a non-controversial way, but...at some point, I switched from thinking a desirable, throw-the-money-at-them developer is somebody who writes a lot of code to somebody who understands things and is capable of understanding new ones when they arise.

I'm not saying that to excuse thrash. Thrash is bad. But like..."oh, at some point you'll have to have somebody who actually understands how the thing we use to make money works"--you should have that person anyway! It's an existential threat to your business not to.

Understanding things is our job. Unless you're somewhere where understanding things isn't valued, and 1) it's gonna eventually fail, and 2) you have better places to be.

> somebody who understands things and is capable of understanding new ones when they arise.

Some of us won't let go of the crazy dream that things should be simpler. I want this not because I'm lazy or because I don't understand them but because - dammit - things should be simpler.

Complex things are complex. Attempting to simplify complex systems below this threshold of complexity invariably ends in lost capability or lost fingers when the sharp edge you didn't know was there sneaks up on you.

And web browsers are very complex beasts by design, by accretion, and by necessity.

Sorry, I guess. Does bemoaning it actually help anything?

But we're not talking about web browsers per se - we're talking about the javascript ecosystem. The complexity of which is only indirectly related to that of the browser.

I made this recently just because I wanted to prove to myself that it was possible to have a modern frontend application without all the overhead of build tooling and I have to say I'm pretty happy with it. You can use some of the most important things in browsers today like CSS variables, and ES module imports.

https://gitlab.com/WA9ACE/frontend-starter

That's an interesting project template. Manually managing dependencies and using backbone sounds quite fun!

I was able to create a full web app using Preact with no build pipeline at all. It was not the best experience mostly because of no concatenation.

I ended up adding Parcel for easy Typescript support.

I work for a Fortune 100 company and we still don't have a build pipeline :-(