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noshbrinken | 8 years ago

> The trend started by minifiers like UglifyJS and continued by transpilers like Babel will only accelerate.

Not to be pedantic, but are UglifyJS and Babel "frameworks"? Not a Ember user, so maybe Ember has some sort of built-in source code transformer and that's what the author is referring to?

I think the basic idea that JavaScript developers, especially those working in a browser environment, will increasingly write source code that compiles to JavaScript "bytecode" is not a recent idea. A much more nuanced reflection on that idea can be found here: http://composition.al/blog/2017/07/30/what-do-people-mean-wh....

With all the hand-wringing about "JavaScript fatigue", it's a little bit sad that prominent JavaScript developers use titles like "Compilers are the New Frameworks". The tone of this title is the tone of a bell ringing for the next round of JavaScript fad musical chairs.

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evilduck|8 years ago

> Not to be pedantic, but are UglifyJS and Babel "frameworks"?

The article doesn't make that claim, which kinda invalidates the "pedantry strawman" the rest of your comment is based on.

noshbrinken|8 years ago

>...what we call web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers.

I took that to mean that the frameworks are doing the optimization. But the article doesn't give examples of the frameworks. The only examples of code transforming optimizations are Uglify and Babel. So I thought maybe these were the things the author has in mind and not actual frameworks. I was genuinely confused and prefaced with the aside about pedantry because questioning these kinds of semantics can come across as pedantic.

The second half of my comment stands regardless.