<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>SahAssar</author><text>The appealing thing about not having a build pipeline is not having it. Not having another thing to maintain and update&amp;#x2F;upgrade&amp;#x2F;debug. I&amp;#x27;ve gone through grunt, gulp, webpack and parcel. Somewhere along the way I realized that with es6 imports and css variables I don&amp;#x27;t really need it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t make it complex.</text><parent_chain><item><author>baddox</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;For anything remotely important, you&amp;#x27;re almost certainly going to already want a build pipeline to do things like concatenating&amp;#x2F;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&amp;#x27;re using well-supported things like Babel and its official plugins.</text></item><item><author>pault</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s popular to be sure but handwritten javascript is not that rare nowadays, is it?&lt;p&gt;Long time front end developer here. In the last couple of years I can&amp;#x27;t recall seeing even a single project without a build pipeline (not that they don&amp;#x27;t exist, I just haven&amp;#x27;t encountered them at my day job, first or third party).</text></item><item><author>simias</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not unique to JS. Some compilers took over a decade to implement C99 features. Most of us C coders were still defaulting to C89 for portability well into the late 00&amp;#x27;s. But now C99 is mainstream enough that you can (mostly) safely target it.&lt;p&gt;If you never release new standards you&amp;#x27;ll never be able to use them. I realize that in JS world 4 years is basically an eternity so it&amp;#x27;s hard to project that far but I&amp;#x27;m sure that if you still have to write javascript code 10 years from now you&amp;#x27;ll be happy to be able to use the features of ES2019.&lt;p&gt;Regarding transpilation surely it&amp;#x27;s not as standard as you make it out to be? It&amp;#x27;s popular to be sure but handwritten javascript is not that rare nowadays, is it?</text></item><item><author>mmartinson</author><text>Honest question, not meant to be inflammatory.&lt;p&gt;If we still need to target es5 4 years later, and transpilation is standard practice, why bother? Is the evolution of JS not directed in practice by the authors of Babel and Typescript? If no one can confidently ship this stuff for years after, what’s the incentive to even bother thinking about what is official vs a Babel supported proposal.&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of idiomatic JS with powerful modern features, but in practice every project I’ve seen seems to use a pretty arbitrary subset of the language, with different ideas about best practices and what the good parts are.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>What’s New in ES2019</title><url>https://blog.tildeloop.com/posts/javascript-what%E2%80%99s-new-in-es2019</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>EB66</author><text>&amp;gt; Adding a transpilation step to extend support to older browsers comes with almost no cost to time or maintainability&lt;p&gt;They may be simple concepts, but there&amp;#x27;s definitely still an added cost with transpilation and minification steps.&lt;p&gt;If you work with Babel long enough you&amp;#x27;ll encounter scenarios where the transpiling didn&amp;#x27;t quite work as expected and breaks in-browser.&lt;p&gt;When you&amp;#x27;re debugging minified code in-browser using source maps, it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&amp;#x2F;2002&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;the-law-of-leaky-abstractions&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&amp;#x2F;2002&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;the-law-of-leaky-a...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>baddox</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;For anything remotely important, you&amp;#x27;re almost certainly going to already want a build pipeline to do things like concatenating&amp;#x2F;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&amp;#x27;re using well-supported things like Babel and its official plugins.</text></item><item><author>pault</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s popular to be sure but handwritten javascript is not that rare nowadays, is it?&lt;p&gt;Long time front end developer here. In the last couple of years I can&amp;#x27;t recall seeing even a single project without a build pipeline (not that they don&amp;#x27;t exist, I just haven&amp;#x27;t encountered them at my day job, first or third party).</text></item><item><author>simias</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not unique to JS. Some compilers took over a decade to implement C99 features. Most of us C coders were still defaulting to C89 for portability well into the late 00&amp;#x27;s. But now C99 is mainstream enough that you can (mostly) safely target it.&lt;p&gt;If you never release new standards you&amp;#x27;ll never be able to use them. I realize that in JS world 4 years is basically an eternity so it&amp;#x27;s hard to project that far but I&amp;#x27;m sure that if you still have to write javascript code 10 years from now you&amp;#x27;ll be happy to be able to use the features of ES2019.&lt;p&gt;Regarding transpilation surely it&amp;#x27;s not as standard as you make it out to be? It&amp;#x27;s popular to be sure but handwritten javascript is not that rare nowadays, is it?</text></item><item><author>mmartinson</author><text>Honest question, not meant to be inflammatory.&lt;p&gt;If we still need to target es5 4 years later, and transpilation is standard practice, why bother? Is the evolution of JS not directed in practice by the authors of Babel and Typescript? If no one can confidently ship this stuff for years after, what’s the incentive to even bother thinking about what is official vs a Babel supported proposal.&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of idiomatic JS with powerful modern features, but in practice every project I’ve seen seems to use a pretty arbitrary subset of the language, with different ideas about best practices and what the good parts are.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>What’s New in ES2019</title><url>https://blog.tildeloop.com/posts/javascript-what%E2%80%99s-new-in-es2019</url></story>