Without going into too much detail it's recommended to start with a recurve because it will help you achieve results with your techinque faster.
You can always switch to barebow, or traditional bow, or compound, or longbow if you wish.
Starting out with your bow
It's possible that your new bow will be heavier than you expect. So this is what you should do when coming to the club:
Get both your bow and the club bow, and set them near you
Start shooting with your bow.
Once you feel that you're getting tired, continue with the club bow (a much lighter bow)
Continue that every training until you can shoot all arrows just with your bow.
Example:
Your goal is to shoot 100 arrows
You shoot 30 arrows with your bow, and you start feeling tired
Shoot the remaining 70 arrows with the club bow
The next time you'll probably shoot 40 arrows with your bow, and the time after that 70 arrows etc.
ILF
Make sure that the components you buy (riser, limbs) are ILF (International limb fitting) standard. It's one of the few standards that exist in archery, and you want things to fit together.
Components you need
Riser (sv: stock), ILF
Get the one that you like (color, look etc.)
Even the cheapest one at a shop like Bågar & Pilar will be better than you need
It will last you forever
Even though you might end up changing/upgrading it in a few years
Example: Risers by Win&Win have a budget series that can be had for under 2300 SEK.
Limbs (sv: lemmar), ILF
Get the cheapest shittiest limbs you can find
If you practice, you'll need heavier limbs pretty soon (often withing half a year)
After that you keep them at home for when something happens and you don't train for a long time. Then you start with the lighter limbs again
String
String thickness depends on the arrow nocks. Go for the small nocks.
Don't go for the fastes of the fastest strings
Go for HOYT Formula 8190 or similar
Stringer: sv: påsträngare [optional]
This is a tool to string your bow in the absence of other helper tools. There are many different ones, but you may want a lighter smaller one that you can carry with you everywhere. Like this:
Arrow rest
The arrow rest should be as smal and light as possible. You want a magnetic arrow rest like in the picture. These ones are easy to attach, the magnet makes sure the arrow rest rests the position when the arrow flies away, it doesn't wear out (like soft/rubber rests do).
Don't buy the ceapest or the most expensive one, buy a good one. A good example is Shibuya.
Plunger
The plunger nudges your arrow to make sure it straightens its flight path quicker once you let it loose. A plunger will need tuning according to how you shoot.
Same as arrow rest, don't buy the ceapest or the most expensive one, buy a good one.
Sight
Spend all your money on a sight
If you buy a good one, you will never need another one, ever. The last for decades.
Make sure you're buying a sight suitable for your shooting hand (that is, right-handed, or left-handed)
Stabilizer (sv: stabbar/stabilisatorer)
As a beginner, you want the middle one and the V-bar (to attach side stabilizers later). This is to make sure that the side stabilisers don't help you too much before you develop a proper technique.
Don't go for the cheapest or for the most expensive ones, go for the good ones, they will also last you for a long time. If you find a set of all three stabilisers that goes for a good price, get that, you'll probably want those side stabilisers later.
Quiver (sv: koger) [recommended]
This is, of course personal preference, but there are a few things to consider:
The arrow holder should be split into sections:
they don't rub against each other and don't damage each other as much when they are split into smaller bunches
if an arrow breaks or becomes damaged during shooting, you just place it into a different section, and continue shooting
if you're going for competitions, this helps you keep track of how many arrows you shoot (just split by three per section)
Several pockets is nice to store smaller things like repair kits, stringers and like.
If you go for a quiver with pockets, make sure they can be closed/zipped-up: easier to store stuff, protection from rain when shooting outside etc.
Bow stand [optional, recommended]
Magnetic bow stand will simply protect your bow, and makes it convenient to put it down to rest etc.
Bow square (sv: trängvinkeln) [optional]
To set nocking points on arrows
Finger sling (sv. fingerslinga)
Most archers don't use the sling pictured below, and insted use the finger sling pictured above
While you can buy finger slings, you can just make them out of shoe laces (as pictured above). You want a sports shoe lace that is flat (not round).
You will need at least two of these because they can be easily lost. And you shouldn't just use one of them, but use change them from time to time so that they are the same length, state etc., and don't affect you.
Arrows
Do not buy until you've used your own bow for a while. Then you will measure your finger pull weight, and will figure out which arrows you need, and then buy them.
Arrows also consist of four parts that you may need to buy separately:
shaft
nock (chose small ones, see also string section above)
tip
vanes
Summary of equipment
Required
Equipment
How much money to spend
Riser ILF Right/left-handed
When buying new from a specialized store, even the cheapest one is more than enough
Limbs ILF
The cheapest and the shittiest
String
Whichever, suitable for small arrow nocks, don't go for the fastest of the fast
Arrow rest Right/left-handed
Don't buy the cheapest or the most expensive
Plunger
Don't buy the cheapest or the most expensive
Sight Right/left-handed
Spend all your money on it
Stabilisers
Look for a good price
Special mention:
Equipment
How much money to spend
Arrows
Don't buy until you've used your bow for a while
Optional / recommended / you'll probably need it sooner or later
Equipment
Notes
Quiver Right/left-handed
Compartments for arrows. Pockets. Pockets can be closed/zipped-up
Bow stand
Light magnetic
Bow square
Stringer
Small a light to carry around
Bag
Lots of pockets to carry small stuff, a tube to carry arrows and stabilisers
Allen key set
Both inches and millimiters (because parts often come in either)
Personal notes
These are numbers for my own first bow:
Part
Measurements
Riser
25" (could be called medium by some companies)
Limbs
70" 26#
The measurement above is for a draw length of slightly over 29" (29.2" or 29.3")
There's no end of John Gruber advocating for privacy and fighting Meta/Facebook. These are just some of the quotes, and I really like the last one: "The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts."
And Apple’s new tracking-related features are not “anti-tracking”. They’re simply about raising user awareness of tracking and giving users control over it.
Let’s say a cottage industry arose where commercial companies were, unbeknownst to most people, plugging their fleets of electric vehicles into the outdoor power outlets on people’s homes overnight. “No one told us not to plug our electric delivery vans into these homes’ freely available power outlets.” And then, after this practice comes to light, the electric company adds a feature where every time a new vehicle is plugged into your outdoor power outlet, you, the homeowner, need to authorize that vehicle as being allowed to charge using the electricity you pay for. If you don’t authorize it, they don’t get the juice.
27 May 2021about Facebook's reaction to AppStore privacy labels
Let’s get them some lollipops, make the boo-boo feel better.
(Alternative quip: “By sharply reducing burglaries, police are limiting the ability of pawn shops to create value from stolen goods.”)
Apple’s “Privacy Nutrition Labels” launched this week on the App Store... It’s worth going right to the source to know what Apple is requiring here, because the companies who are coming out of this looking bad are attempting to misdirect attention.
To see them in action, just go to any app’s listing and scroll down a bit, and you can’t miss them. View the details for apps that respect your privacy and you’ll see a concise listing. View the details for apps that don’t — like, say, Instagram or Facebook — and you’ll get screen after screen showing just how much information about you they collect. Instagram and Facebook’s app privacy listings look like those crazy-long receipts from CVS.
There’s also an implication here that Apple didn’t give the companies who’d be affected by ATT sufficient notice before instituting the changes. And we all know who the primary “company” is: Facebook. I’d say Apple bent over backwards to give Facebook time, and how Facebook reacted is instructional.
This new ad from Apple touting iPhone privacy protection is good, and genuinely funny. But what makes it funny — the premise is a series of people loudly sharing in the real world the sort of information that gets unknowingly tracked online — is actually the perfect analogy to help explain how the tracking industry — what ought to be considered the privacy theft industry — has grown into existence.
Consider the new ad-tracking privacy protection feature in iOS 14. The tracking industry, led by Facebook, is up in arms about it
The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts. They have zero right, none, to the tracking they’ve been getting away with. We, as a society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it. You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do.
And more (such as upcoming Digital Services acts requiring to have non-algorithmic feeds, Norway banning facebook's behavioural advertising etc.)
Gruber's reaction to this has been stellar. It started even prior to this, when many Mastodon admins have decided to pre-emptively block Threads if it ever implements ActivityPub protocol. But he definitely went ballistic when Threads launched. Both over at Daring Fireball and in his personal accounts:
Threads is the most fun, most interesting new product of the year, and no one in the E.U. can use it, or will be able to use it anytime soon, because their own elected officials passed a law that effectively bans it.
There are countless more where he defends Threads from any possible angle.
John Gruber and the tragedy of preaching to the choir
Let's skip the obvious conspiracy theory that John Gruber is paid by Meta to promote and defend Threads. I think the reason is much simpler and sadder.
Over the years Daring Fireball has built a loyal following. It has always been a good source of Apple gossip, decent summaries of tech-related discussions etc. And a lot of that audience has been sycophantic.
In the mad rush to exit Twitter several things happened:
Twitter audience has declined
BlueSky audience never really materialised (it's still tiny, invite-only, and with multiple scalability issues)
And Mastodon...
Mastodon isn't sycophantic in the least. Every time Gruber praises Threads and bashes privacy regulations Mastodon audience is not amused, and it's a polite way to phrase it.
I think Gruber now yearns for the days when he could mostly preach to the choir. Unfortunately for him, the alternatives to Twitter (Mastodon and BlueSky) never gave him this opportunity. An app from fuckers whose entitlement is just off the charts might just be it.
You can safely say that was the last time you saw or heard Macintosh in the entire 1 hour and 50 minute-long presentation. In total Mac was mentioned at most a few times (even if we count the ambiguous “across all devices”) for a total of maybe 10 seconds.
The first time Mac was mentioned even in passing was 40 minutes in during Apple Arcade presentation. Apple Arcade was presented as “World’s first game subscription survice for mobile, desktop, and living room”. It was followed by a short film about games and game developers. There was no desktop game mentioned or shown in the entire video.
Thank god, we’ll be able to play games on Mac as well. “You can continue when you left off even if you switch devices.” So? Only iPhone/iPad games? No word or screenshot of the Mac App Store, only the iOS App Store.
Mac was on screen for a total of ~1s during Apple Arcade presentation.
The longest the Mac stayed on screen was to serve as a nice static background for Tim Cook as he was talking about something else.
Next was Apple TV. They kept repeating “on all your screens, on all your screens”. I’m guessing these are “all your screens”?
The presentation continued with “You saw the new Apple TV app on Apple TV 4k, it looks stunning on iPad, and of course is available on iPhone.” So, no hope?
You know, at the very least they give honorary Oscars or something to actors who are no longer starring, but need to be mentioned.
Oh. Look. They actually decided to bring the Apple TV app to the Mac. For the first time, this fall. Also, if I’m not mistaken, it’s the first time they mentioned Mac by name. At 1 hour mark.
And that was it. The first time was also the last time.
The rest was about Netflix wannabe sorry, Apple TV+.
I will borrow the excellent straightforward definition from Exploring JS:
The following is a tagged template literal (short: tagged template):
tagFunction`Hello ${firstName} ${lastName}!`
Putting a template literal after an expression triggers a function call, similar to how a parameter list (comma-separated values in parentheses) triggers a function call. The previous code is equivalent to the following function call (in reality, first parameter is more than just an Array, but that is explained later).
Thus, the name before the content in backticks is the name of a function to call, the tag function. The tag function receives two different kinds of data:
Template strings such as 'Hello '.
Substitutions such as firstName (delimited by ${}). A substitution can be any expression.
…
Additionally, tag functions get two versions of each template string:
A “raw” version in which backslashes are not interpreted (\n becomes \\n, a string of length 2)
A “cooked” version in which backslashes are special (\n becomes a string with just a newline in it).
This is literally all there is to tagged template literals. It’s a function call with an array of strings (each string is in two versions), and an array of substitutions between the elements of said strings.
What are tagged template literals presented as?
I believe this is the future of JSX, and it’s only just getting started. There are some very interesting optimizations Tagged Templates make available, like identifying and hoisting static parts of a view (essentially memoizing them).
Writing HTML in HTML files, writing code between <script> tags, writing Javascript in .js files is the same as writing code in string blobs and parsing them at runtime.
These are tagged templates, not strings. They work as code at runtime, and it already has support to optimize it, compile it, etc. This is JS all the way down.
There are many more, but they all basically come down to the same thing: //there’s no difference between a JS-file loaded into and run by the JS VM, and run-time function calls with arrays of opaque strings//. And this is the future, and it’s amazing.
So why do I think these are bad?
Once again, I’ll steal a quote:
…we’ve learned not to write code in strings. You’d think this would be a fundamental law of software engineering
…
Writing code, not strings, means you can do everything to it that you can do to code. You can type check code. You can lint it. You can optimize it, compile it, validate it, syntax highlight it, format it with tools like Prettier, tree shake it…
In a language that’s already a laughing stock for its insane dynamic type system, we said: “It’s all right, we’ll have all our code in strings now, thank you very much, and we’ll make sure we parse it at runtime because what can possibly go wrong”.
The only reason projects like lit-html, HTM and some others can boast about their “accomplishments” building fast, effecient libraries is because string handling has been insanely optimised by the modern Javascript VMs. And that .innerHTML is no longer the slowest operation on the DOM. Let’s look at some examples, shall we?
JSX-like syntax in plain Javascript is somewhat of a lie. That’s HTML(-like) syntax inside plain strings that are processed by plain Javascript at run time. So I guess it still makes this plain Javascript I guess 🤷♂️?
When I first heard of HTM, it looked something like this. Of course, it was doing exactly the same thing as lit-html: regular expressions, string blobs, and innerHtml before it got React/Preact integrations.
Thankfully, the current version is smarter and smaller. It creates what is essentially an AST of the parsed structure that’s then passed on to the actual rendering function. However it’s still the same thing: parsing a bunch of opaque strings at run time. Opaque because neither the JS VM nor the browser know what’s in those strings.
And I mean… Why parse strings and build (potentially huge) ASTs at runtime when you can do actual function calls which, you know, can be optimised by the VM etc.? But I digress.
It maintains its own list of tags (new tags and web compoinents are out of question?), it will generate and inject styles on render by going to great lengths to figure out what the hell we got passed, there are some regexps here and there.
Well, you got the gist. String blobs are being painstakingly parsed, and then reassembled.
They all do the same thing: the parse the strings at runtime. In many cases they concatenate some strings or produce some objects. They return some result or just directly dump it into the DOM.
Why is this bad again?
Because this isn’t code. This is literally taking a bunch of opaque string blobs, parsing them at runtime, and producing some result. All of programming has been busy moving away from coding in strings and parsing stuff at runtime. For the past few years Javascript has been happily re-introducing the worst programming practices. And devs get away with it, too, just because modern Javascript VMs and browser DOM are optimised way more than they have any right to.
Are they DSLs or embedded DSLs? They are probably weak embedded DSLs, but I’ll let people more knowledgeable than I decide.
They also lead to some horrible developer experiences. You cannot place a breakpoint on a string. You can place a breakpoint on the interpolated expressions inside one, or on the actual tagged literal function call, but good luck figuring out if you made a type somewhere.
Since these are just arbitrary strings, no common tools will be able to lint them, analyse them, optimise them unless you write a very specific tool for this particular very specific string structure. And yes, that includes JS VMs.
As you’ve seen above, people are in all seriousness talking about re-implementing optimisations that compilers already do for actual code: memoisation, inlining, optimising common paths, code elimination. Pure madness.
You wanted macros? Here, have run-time string concatenation and regexp parsing, and stringly-typed everything.
There's nothing great or particularly amazing about Angular and its build processes.
Everything Angular does is fighting against its own architectural decisions. On a high level it's like this:
We write in Typescript, we need to compile to Javascript
Typescript cannot compile our templates because they are custom templates
We need to compile templates
Typescript compiler barfs at some of our code, we need to fix the code, or the compiler, or both, or hack in between them
The resulting Javascript is hundreds of kilobytes larger than any competition.
We need to somehow reduce the size
Let's throw Google Closure Compiler in
It cannot reliably process JS code produced by Typescript compiler
(side note: it cannot reliably process any JS code outside of Google's 'goog:module' and Closure Library even with "SIMPLE" optimisations)
Let's create a separate tool, Tsickle, that will help convert TypeScript code into Closure-compatible Javascript code.
The tool is a hack, because Typescript compiler doesn't expose compiler-as-a-service
And also let's do "Ahead-of-time" compilation on templates etc.
So now we produce marginally less code. It takes insane amounts of time to not only build, but even rebuild and do incremental changes
Oh, let's take Google's Bazel! It promises to be so fast!
Only doesn't know anything about compiling Typescript.
So we write new rules (aka configs) for typescript, for typescript code server, and a bunch of other stuff.
So now we will have:
Typescript compiling
Tsickle converting
Templates compiling
Closure Compiler compiling
Bazel orchestrating
So, nothing really changed (only the build chain is becoming increasingly complex and impossible to reason about), and yet "OMG Angular is so great: Google makes it possible to use it with Bazel and Closurescript instead of the circus that is Webpack and UglifyJS" 😂
Disclaimer: I talk a lot about React here, but you can substitute your favorite library: Inferno, Preact, Vue, snabbdom, virtual-dom (or non-js libraries and frameworks like Elm, Om, etc.). Similarly, replace Polymer with Vaadin, or X-Tag, or…
Brief, incomplete, and mostly incorrect history of Web Components
Ancient times
By 2011 Internet had grown. It had Facebooks and Gmails, and Twitters, and Asanas, and Google Docs, and countless other online things that could no longer be called sites, or Single Page Applications. They were, for all intents and puposes, applications. As simple as that.
And woe was to the devs who were developing them.
State of the art for Web GUIs at the time was probably a templating language glued together by some serverside logic and/or a client-side library. Backbone if you were lucky. jQuery UI or Sencha/ExtJs if you were enterprise enough.
This was cumbersome. This was limiting. You could not prototype easily and quickly. You could not easily escape the limitations of UI libraries. etc. etc. etc.
And you were limited to the same set of HTML elements as ever: divs, ps, formss…
I think we’re stuck today in a little bit of a rut of extensibility. We wind up leaning on JavaScript to get things, because it is the Turing complete language in our environment. It is the only thing that can give us an answer when CSS and HTML fail us. So we wind up piling ourselves into the JavaScript boat. We keep piling into the JavaScript boat.
Bruce yesterday brought up the great example of an empty body tag, and sort of this pathological case of piling yourself into the JavaScript boat, where you wind up then having to go recreate all of the stuff that the browser was going to do more or less for you if you’d sent markup down the wire in order to get back to the same value that was going to be provided to you if you’d done it in markup. But you did it for a good reason. Gmail has an empty body tag, not because it’s stupid. Gmail does that because that’s how you can actually deliver the functionality of Gmail in a way that’s both meaningful and reliable and maintainable. You wind up putting all of your bets, all of your eggs, into the JavaScript basket.
…
It takes browsers time to implement stuff. We have to get it out to users, now users have to start using it, and then we have to look at our deployed population and go, “OK, now I can use this feature, I can target this feature.”
So as developers, this is the sort of things we thrive on. The faster that this crank turns, the more chances we get to see new features enter the market that we can start to target. “OK, well, this is good.”
…
So we wind up with this unspoken tension between deep pragmatism and the Platonic ideal of where we would like to be. But we don’t have a really good model for thinking about it.
…
The more of this behavior [behavior agreed-upon, known to devs, and implemented in the browser] that we take into ourselves, the more we do in JavaScript, the more we get away from the idea of shared ambiguity, which is what makes the world work.
…
We want to feed this process of progress. I think we get stuck in a place where we consider HTML5, we’re done.
And then he goes on to introduce and demo Web Components, which at the time were three different things: Scoped CSS, Shadow DOM and Web Components. (I also highly recommend his talk in general)
But then W3C happened. In true w3c fashion it went ahead and spent another 5 years defining the Platonic ideal and never feeding the progress as a result.
Cue in Facebook
Facebook application is complex. It might not look like it, but it is. Those little boxes everywhere on the page have surprisingly complex layouts which have to be repeated, and/or customized, and/or adjusted in various contexts. A developer would naturally want to do the following: take this box element, and put it here, and apply these random styles to it without disturbing anything on the page.
And it has to be reasonably fast. Because, well, DOM updates are notoriously slow, and there are countless articles detailing how you absolutely must reduce the number of times you access the DOM.
It’s so bad that innerHTML, a sign of horrible smelly code, is on par with or faster than DOM manipulation.
So, what did Facebook do? Oh, simple, they basically wrote their own implementation of Web Components entirely in Javascript. With an XML-based DSL to boot. They called it React and unleashed it unto the world in 2013.
React provides you with following:
a way to define your own custom elements
place them on the page with HTML-like syntax
provides a fast virtual DOM implementation that minimizes changes to the actual DOM
has very few limitations on what you can do with or within components because it’s Javascript all the way down (the DSL is a thin wrapper on top of a small number of functions)
No wonder React took the world by storm. Those who weren’t writing it were surely talking about it. It spawned several competitiors that are aiming for the same feature set (Inferno, Preact) or various subsets, most notably Virtual DOM (Snabbdom, virtual-dom etc.).
2017
In 2017 React fulfills all the promises of Web Components: it lets you write performant reusable self-contained components. It can run on almost any Javascript-enabled browser (React doesn’t support IE < 9).
As the ecosystem blossomed, it went far beyond the scope of Web Components. If I’m not mistaken, CSS Modules proposal appeared because it was first implemented in, and for, React.
In 2017 Web Components are in development despite already spawning two versions each of two of underlying standards.
At the time of this writing the situation for Web Components looks like this:
So what’s this broken promise I hear about?
Well, the main failure is obvious: they are nowhere to be seen. The promise of “feeding the process of progress” is unfulfilled. By their 6th year they spawned a total of 6 standards. Two of them are already deprecated. Only one major browser is commited to supporting them (sorry, Opera, you’re no longer a major browser, and you run on top of Chrome these days).
The other broken promise is the one bandied about in the Internets these days: interoperable custom components without vendor lock-ins.
And this is the one that got me writing this overly long piece of thinking out loud.
Polymer is Google’s attempt at creating a Web Components-compliant implementation:
Unlock the Power of Web Components. Polymer is a JavaScript library that helps you create custom reusable HTML elements, and use them to build performant, maintainable apps.
Polymer shows the main problem with Web Components: they are DOM.
This is a custom component. Its style is defined by a JavaScript object. Its children are defined by maping over an array of values and producing another component. In this case it’s a <p>, but it could be anything. This component’s children is the current array value.
I assume the limitations described above were the immediate problem that Polymer faced. How do you work around this? Well, you invent your own not-really-JavaScript-but-kinda-Javascript kinda-templating-kinda-scripting kinda-language. That can only exist in strings.
Work your way through Polymer’s data system for a full overview. Below are just some examples.
Note: none of these [[]], {{}}, $= etc. are in the Web Component spec
In all seriousness though. Web Components ended up delivering hardly anything from their original promises (or have hardly answered any of the originally raised questions):
content models are strange (we’ll have to wait and see how they end up interacting in deeply nested structures)
To work around limitations (such as string attributes) libraries will (and have) come up with incompatible ways to pass data
is Polymer’s attr$='{{user.name}}' better than Vaadin’s item-label-path="name.first" or Angular’s <div *ngFor="let hero of heroes">{{hero.name}}</div> or more compatible with others?
What, where, and how should I import the entirety of a library X to deal with their weird ways of dealing with DOM limitations if I deal with multiple nested components?
DOM APIs are horrible, cumbersome, awkward and clunky. Polymer and others are bravely trying to use DOM APIs only, but even they resort to innerHTML anywhere they don’t have to put on a show (tests, for example). When Web Components take root, the web will be flooded with less performant innerHTMLs and possibly re-implementations of snabbdoms and virtual-doms (obviously incompatible)
how will this help with interoperability and vendor lock-ins if everyone will chose their own ways of dealing with this?
Scoped CSS…
CSS Modules. Need I say more?
These are just a few warts I could come up wth off the top of my head. I haven’t seen them really truly discussed anywhere.
We’re not going to use it at all at Facebook. We’re not going to build React on it because there’s a strong model difference – imperative in Web Components to declarative in React. Web Components doesn’t have an idiomatic way to define things like where events go. How do you pass data when everything is a string? We see it more as an interop layer that lets various frameworks talk to each other.
Nowadays React lets you have them as the leaf nodes in the component tree because React assumes any component name that starts with a lowercase to be a DOM element.
There’s a lot of stuff in Web Components spec that is nice. Being able to customize how select work for example (like dropdowns). So there’s a lot of great stuff in Web Components, but it’s not gonna be the way you structure your applications. and that’s what React tries to solve: how do you structure your application, manipulate the DOM.
Web Components are more of the same regular DOM API. What I like to think of it is: it standardized the worst practices.
There are very very few discussions about these issues except for comments on Twitter or on various articles. The consensus seems to be “Web Components is the glorious interoparable fast performant future”.
tl;dr: Closure compiler makes little to no sense outside of Google's ecosystem.
Nolan Lawson conducted a very nice research on how various Javasctip tools bundle/compile Javascript. I highly recommend it: The cost of small modules.
This article has made several rounds on Twitter and many people have asked: Why aren't more people using Closure? There are many reasons for that.
Considering the direstate of Javascript tools today, Google's Closure compiler is yet another cryptic, badly configured, half-baked tool to throw into the ever-growing pile of twigs and sticks called Javascript infrastructure.
Documentation
There's basically none.
The Quickstart shows how to create a page that contains basically exactly one line of Javascript code. Instead of showing you how to do more, the next step is Advanced compilation which is basically Javascript one-liners interspersed with Python code to invoke the compiler service.
How do I set up a project to compile my application?
How do I properly process the multiple modules my application has?
How do I include/process third-party modules?
How do I bundle stuff?
etc.
All these are unanswered.
Let's download the app then. There could me more info.
To run this you need a library you don't need
The README for the compiler has this nugget:
If you're using globs or many files, you may start to run into problems with managing dependencies between scripts. In this case, you should use the Closure Library. It contains functions for enforcing dependencies between scripts, and Closure Compiler will re-order the inputs automatically.
If you follow the link, this is the page you land on:
The Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. You can pull just what you need from a large set of reusable UI widgets and controls, and from lower-level utilities for DOM manipulation, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and more.
WAT?
I want to handle my dependencies, not have a UI library. Maybe they refer to ClosureBuilder? I have no idea.
Let's maybe run it?
I have some code in my app that consists of multiple modules, relies on some third-library code (node_modules) etc. The entry point is index.js
How do I run it so that it generates code I need to run my app in the browser?
However you run it, it only produces some minified code that:
Doesn't include any dependencies (except those directly in the folder)
Generates code that throws a require is not defined error in the browser
At this point I'm ready to give up because, well, I already have my sweet set up that handles everything, transpiles, and compiles, and minifies, and bundles all code.
Switching to ADVANCED compilation modules may pollute your console output with mutiple warnings or errors that are also not helpful in the least.
In (small) conclusion
Google's Closure compiler makes no sense outside Google infrastructure. When you have set up everything the Google way and there are people to help you along as you run into problems, you're ok.
When you're alone (as most devs are), you will either spend an unknown number of hours going through error-messages, disassembling the setups of other projects (ClojureScript, Angular 2)...
Or just use the tools which you kinda sorta can setup without going insane
Building JavaScript apps is overly complex right now
Among other things The State of JS 2016 asked developers if they disagreed (1), were neutral (3), or agreed (5) with the following statement: Building JavaScript apps is overly complex right now.
A full 59% of developers agree that Building JavaScript apps is overly complex right now. Only 16% disagree.
Javascript fatigue is real, no matter how hard some people try to shrug it off (see this for an example).
We’re told: move fast and break things. For once, just for once, I would like to stop breaking things and stick to something that works. Half of the issues here is something I’ve encountered in the past two weeks alone, when trying to create a project from scratch.
Developer Experience
Developer Experience is not a lost art. It’s an art that has never been discovered. It was briefly discussed a few years ago and then forgotten. These days if you ever hear it mentioned, it’s usually in the context of APIs.
However (emphasis mine):
As software consumes the world around us, good design in our tools is a growing competitive advantage
Our tools shape our work, and great tools change the shape of our industry.
We talk a lot about the importance of a strong engineering team, but not enough about the design of our tools and the impact it has on the quality of the products we build. We should be talking about DX more, and it’s not enough to talk about UX alone.
Javascript tools are quite literally death by a thousand cuts. The whole experience of working with and building for Javascript is, at the very least, an excercise in frustration. The landscape is utterly hostile to developers. With experience you learn to navigate it, somewhat safely. Is it an experience you need, though?
Falsehoods programmers believe about Javascript tools
Tools work when you run them
Tools can be configured
In JSON
In Javascript
Can be pointed to different config file
Don’t use hidden/special files like .something.rc
Tools fail if their config is incorrect
Tools warn you about invalid values in configs
Tools ignore invalid values in config
Tools use defaults instead of invalid values in config
Tools don’t ignore valid values in config
Well, at least tools report non-config errors
At least fatal errors?
Tools propagate errors from their plugins or sub-tools
At least fatal errors? I asked that one already, didn’t I?
You can tell if an error originated in the tool, in a plugin or in a sub-tool
At least, errors are clearly stated on screen/in logs
At least, with reasonable and relevant information
Tools can be invoked from command line
Tools can be run on a list of files
With glob patterns
Minor versions of tools, or their plugins, or their sub-parts keep backwards compatibility
Tools fail if none of their requirements are satisfied
Tools fail if some of their requirements are not satisfied
Errors or warnings if this happens
There is only one way to do things
There is more than one way to do things
These many ways lead to the same result
Your tool will be relevant 5 years from now
Ok, a year from now
So, let’s talk tools.
npm
npm is the ubiquitous javascript tool. You may still run into bower occasionally, but that battle seems to have been lost.
npm is:
a package manager
a dependency tracker
a build tool (node.js’s make, if you will)
a task runner
It probably does other tasks, but these are the most important ones. It does its job quite well, and I cannot recommend this post highly enough. Still, there are gotchas.
Run whatever I think you want, not what you want
This is relatively a minor WTF, but it’s there nonetheless:
If the specified configuration param resolves unambiguously to a known configuration parameter, then it is expanded to that configuration parameter. For example:
npm ls --par
# same as:
npm ls --parseable
In the example above --par is an invalid parameter. npm will not silently ignore it (which would be bad). npm will silently expand it to whatever parameter or combination of parameters it fuzzy matched.
npm has been notoriously bad at detecting actual errors. For example, until version 3.x (!) it would not fail if its configuration file wasinvalid.
Depend on whatever I you think you want, not what you want
Let’s consider npm install --save. This installs a dependency and adds it to the dependency list in your project’s package.json. And by saving I mean “take the list of dependencies, sort it alphabetically, and write it back to disk”.
This would not be a problem, save for this:
The npm client installs dependencies into the node_modules directory non-deterministically. This means that based on the order dependencies are installed, the structure of a node_modules directory could be different from one person to another. These differences can cause “works on my machine” bugs that take a long time to hunt down.
Many were quick to attribute the problem to the horrible programmer culture of JavaScript, where people have forgotten how to program. It’s not the case. JavaScript community has whole-heartedly adopted Unix’s philosophy of “one package has to do one thing, and do it well”, but may have taken it to extremes.
npm and npm’s registry are essential to developers and to developer experience. The way some/many of arising issues are handled by npm’s organisation are clearly detrimental to developer experience.
Your package name doesn’t matter. Until it matters
So after a search for various of keywords I found out that the module name npmjs was still available in the registry. In the four years that the registry existed nobody took the effort in registering it. This module was and is a perfect fit for my module.
On the 22th I received an email from Isaac, the CEO of npm Inc (which recently raised more than 2M in funding for his company) and creator of npm with a question:
Can you please choose another name for this module? It’s extremely confusing. Thanks.
…
It didn’t even matter what how right or wrong I was for using npmjs as a module name Isaac had clearly already decided to destroy the module as he stated there wasn’t any negotiation and that it would be deleted no matter what.
Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Ok, what about this story then (emphasis mine)?
For a few minutes today the package “fs” was unpublished from the registry in response to a user report that it was spam. It has been restored.
More detail: the “fs” package is a non-functional package. It simply logs the word “I am fs” and exits. There is no reason it should be included in any modules. However, something like 1000 packages do mistakenly depend on “fs”, probably because they were trying to use a built-in node module called “fs”.
Should you even allow publishing a module that has the same name as an intenal one?
If npmjs is confusing, how is fsnot confusing?
If thousands of packages depend on it, how can you remove it considering the SNAFU you had just several months prior?
npm devs are clueless? (added 2016-12-27)
Event though npm is a rather nice package manager, its devs often behave like they haven’t got a clue as to what’s happening, or how development should happen.
Performance drop by 40% or more
At one point npm implemented a new progress bar which slowed down installation speeds by 40% and more. See related issue. Worse still, it was now enabled by default (disabled by default in the previous version).
You’ve got to love some comments from the npm dev team:
I’ve been aware of this as an issue for a while and the fix was literally 10 minutes or so of effort, but it hadn’t bubbled up in priority as I hadn’t realized how big an impact it was having.
Or, in a related issue (this appeared after the release):
Profiling would be grand… Put together a minimal benchmark to work against… Ideally I’d like this benchmark to be 2.x and 3.x compatible so we can directly compare different parts.
We break your stable branch, we’re not going to fix it
They are all broken in more ways than one. Let me just quote from my own experience (read the whole article for more than just this one snippet):
Let’s step back for a second, and consider:
Grunt does not transform code, it’s a “task runner” The task it runs is called browserify
Well, the problem with the browserify task8 is that the task runner cannot run it. It needs a plugin called grunt-browserify* to do that
Oh, and browserify has to run babel on the source code before it can do anything with it.
And the problem is that browserify cannot run babel directly. It needs babelify to work
All in all the whole toolchain to produce a Javascript file is grunt -> grunt-browserify -> browserify -> babelify -> babel. And someone in that chain decides that babel missing all of its specified plugins is not a reason to throw an error, stop and report.
Are these problems fixed now? I don’t know. I no longer even care if they are fixed or not. I got myself new shiny better toys to play with. Or did I?
webpack
Webpack is almost the latest and greatest in a web-developer’s life (there’s a more latest now, called Rollup).
On the surface it does the following: take all the modules that your app has, figure out dependencies between them, bundle them up in a single file that you can serve to your website.
All webpack understands is ES5 and some common module structures: CommonJS, AMD etc. It can invoke so-called loaders whose job is to take a file and produce an ES5 output which Webpack will then take and bundle.
As a result, you can somewhat easily depend on anything: modules written in ES6, or in TypeScript, or in Coffeescript, or… You can even depend on CSS files or PNGs. If there’s a loader for that type of file, Webpack can bundle it.
Boilerplates
Also as a result, Webpack’s configuration is inane. And I don’t say it lightly.
Search github for “boilerplate”, and you will come away with easily hundreds of “this is configuration you need to get you started” because it is very nearly impossible to configure webpack.
Webpack is not alone to blame for this. It’s also the fractured tools, the fractured libraries etc.
Yes, the above is configuration for css-loader. Yes, it is a string that contains URL-like structure where parameters you pass in are, well, URL query parameters. Because reasons.
There’s a reason for that, obviously. There always is.
This is a plugin. Acting as a loader. It has a pre-loader, style. And a loader. Which is a combination of two loaders, css and postcss. Oh, and we exclude autoprefixer (plugin? feature?) from the css loader.
Yes, if there’s just one loader, you can provide its parameters as a regular JSON structure (feast your eyes on the query parameters section). However, this is yet another impendancy mismatch you have to deal with when trying to figure out what, where and how to configure all the moving parts.
You go an look for docs on a *-loader, and you run into anything: config as strings, config as objects, a mix of it. And if something goes wrong, you are left alone, there’s no way to know what failed.
But honsetly. How much time do you have to spend to come up with this: ExtractTextPlugin.extract('style', 'css?-autoprefixer!postcss')?
Learn to love the stacktrace
Let’s pretend you are a C++ developer. You use a Makefile to invoke the gcc compiler on your source code. If there is an error in your source code, you will see the relevant error.
For some reason you will never see the stacktraces from either the make tool or from gcc
Not so in Javascript. Because internal stacktraces from the build tools are the bread and butter of everyday JS development.
Enjoy.
> webpack --config webpack.config.js --progress --colors -w -d
Hash: 6f816ab5f143490174a0
Version: webpack 1.13.2
Time: 3176ms
Asset Size Chunks Chunk Names
app.js 1.11 MB 0 [emitted] main
app.js.map 1.25 MB 0 [emitted] main
[0] multi main 28 bytes {0} [built]
+ 226 hidden modules
ERROR in ./js/app/fsm/payment-flow-fsm.ts
Module parse failed: /Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/awesome-typescript-loader/dist/entry.js!/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/js/app/fsm/payment-flow-fsm.ts Unexpected token (3:18)
You may need an appropriate loader to handle this file type.
SyntaxError: Unexpected token (3:18)
at Parser.pp$4.raise (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/acorn/dist/acorn.js:2221:15)
at Parser.pp.unexpected (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/acorn/dist/acorn.js:603:10)
at Parser.pp$3.parseExprAtom (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/acorn/dist/acorn.js:1822:12)
at Parser.pp$3.parseExprSubscripts (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/acorn/dist/acorn.js:1715:21)
at Parser.pp$3.parseMaybeUnary (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/acorn/dist/acorn.js:1692:19)
<...skip 20 or so lines...>
at Parser.parse (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/acorn/dist/acorn.js:516:17)
at Object.parse (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/acorn/dist/acorn.js:3098:39)
<...skip another 20 or so lines...>
at nextLoader (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/webpack-core/lib/NormalModuleMixin.js:290:3)
at /Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/webpack-core/lib/NormalModuleMixin.js:259:5
at Storage.finished (/Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/lib/CachedInputFileSystem.js:38:16)
at /Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/node_modules/webpack/node_modules/enhanced-resolve/node_modules/graceful-fs/graceful-fs.js:78:16
at FSReqWrap.readFileAfterClose [as oncomplete] (fs.js:380:3)
@ ./js/app/index.tsx 9:25-58
ERROR in [default] /Users/dmitriid/Projects/project/js/app/fsm/payment-flow-fsm.ts:3:15
Expression expected.
The relevant ticket for this is webpack/webpack#1245. Note no one even asks the most obvious question: “why in the seven hells would I need internal stacktraces if I’m not a webpack/plugin developer?” Well, not until yours truly came along.
Can you understand what actually failed?
So, I’m running this:
> webpack --config webpack.config.js --progress --colors "-w" "-d"
Hash: 578f6adad579fede3e98
Version: webpack 1.9.6
Time: 3224ms
Asset Size Chunks Chunk Names
app.js 1.12 MB 0 [emitted] main
app.js.map 1.27 MB 0 [emitted] main
[0] multi main 28 bytes {0} [built]
+ 227 hidden modules
ERROR in ./js/app/fsm/state-manager.ts
Module not found: Error: Cannot resolve module 'machina' in /Users/dmitriid/Projects/js/app/fsm
@ ./js/app/fsm/state-manager.ts 2:14-32
Can you immediately tell me if it’s webpack or typescript failing?
As you can clearly see, the first one is a webpack error. The second one is TypeScript error. Relevant issue: webpack/webpack#2878 (there are probably others).
All your options are belong to us
Specifically, the watch option. Could be others. I don’t know and don’t care at this point.
So, if you provide watch: true in Webpack configuration, Webpack will:
This is, unsurprisingly, not entirely correct. See, if you ever decide to create your own build script, and invoke webpack trough its node.js API, you will see that:
webpack provides to separate APIs: run and watch
they are both really identical:
you create a compiler object by invoking webpack with webpack config
you invoke the API
you provide a callback which accepts to parameters err and state
Except
runignores the watch option of config
watch expects a first parameter with options that are already there in the config, really
Because, I guess, reasons. And, surprisingly, the “short” version with webpack(config, callback) works as expected. Who’d a thunk it.
Forget continuous builds (added 2016-12-27)
Just read through this issue. Tl;dr: if webpack fails, it exits with a status code of 0. Because reasons.
And yes, despite this being a majot bug in the main version currenlty used, it has not been fixed in the two years since it was reported. Because reasons.
Nothing works out of the box anymore
Install and run? Sane defaults? These things are becoming a rare beast in the Javascript world. It seems that nothing works out of the box anymore.
In JS world, sadly, going through hoops and withholding crucial information from the developer is now the accepted norm.
Babel
The only job that Babel does is compiling a next version of JavaScript to the current version of Javascript.
Understand this: out of the box the javascript compiler does not do a single thing. You have to install a number of plugins/presets before it even does anything.
Moreover, if there are no presets and no plugins installed, babel will not even complain about it. It will just … do nothing.
Given this index.js file:
[1, 2, 3].map(n => n + 1);
Running freshly installed babel will not even warn you, and will do nothing:
> node_modules/.bin/babel index.js
[1, 2, 3].map(n => n + 1);
Only if you install a preset and specify it, you get back what you need.
This is a special preset that will contain all yearly presets so user’s won’t need to specify each one individually.
Does this sound like a good sane default to you? Why isn’t it the default?
Does it seem that having no presets or plugins should at least raise a warning or something?
The answer is yes in any world other than Javascript.
Typescript
I’ve decided to talk about Typescript, because why not. More often than not Javascript is only used as a target language. Multiple other languages exist that compile/transpile into Javascript while promising nicer features, syntax, tools and so on and so forth.
Typescript is a superset of Javascript developed by Microsoft. It introduces type checks and various niceties into the language.
It includes a nice fast compiler which removes the need for Babel, but, obviously, it introduces a whole host of other problems.
The former one is recommended in typescript docs. The latter one is used in 99% of Webpack boilerplates. Good luck figuring out how they are different, what features they support or don’t support etc.
I haven’t had much experience with ts-loader (yet?), but I’ve alredy run into the following with awesome-typescript-loader.
Who cares about your configs. Part I
Project from scratch. Forgot to create tsconfig.json. No errors whatsoever, obvously. Webpack fails because it cannot parse the non-processed .ts file.
Why did .ts compilation fail? Was it due to a missing tsconfig.json. Wouldn’t it be just so nice if the tools involved could report this?
Who cares about your configs. Part II
When trying to clean up configs I decided to move tsconfig.json to a config directory. Provided path to this file as tsconfig option as per README.
Provided the following invalid option to the compiler in the tsconfig:
{
"compilerOptions": {
"target": "absdefg",
}
}
The config above was accepted, and silently ignored. Everything got compiled. Was the config file even picked up? Well, webpack didn’t fail, so probably it was (see Part I). Who ignored the error? TS compiler? awesome-config-loader? No one knows, and it is impossible to find out.
Third-party modules, do you speak it? (upd. 2016-11-16)
Sooner or later you will have to import modules written in or transpiled to Javascript. Unless you develop a library with no external dependencies (quite possible) or something that only depends on other libraries written in Typescript (highly unlikely).
So, you will find yourself typing something like this into your Typescript code:
Because reasons. Go ahead and try to make sense of the ambient modules section in the docs.
Types, types everywhere
Libraries are developed in whatever language authors prefer. To provide proper static type checking Typescript needs more than the stub module definitions. It needs actual type definitions for libraries.
Thanks to countless contributors to DefinitelyTyped there are quite a few definitions Typescript can use.
Well,…for some definition of “can”.
> npm install @types/superagent
[default] /Users/dmitriid/Projects/keyflow/keyflow-website/app/node_modules/@types/superagent/index.d.ts:83:30
Cannot find name 'Promise'.
See, despite the fact that this is not a single isolated problem, there are no solutions to this.
Well, except one: maybe try a newer version of npm, namely npm 3.x.
I personally have a problem with this. node.js has this thing called Node LTS, Long Term Support. And at the time of this writing it was:
> node -v
v4.6.0
> npm -v
2.15.9
I know, I know. I probably shouldn’t run cutting edge stuff on non-cutting-edge platforms, yada yada.
The problem is there, the problem exists. And, obviously, it exists for some modules, and for others (@types/react works, @types/superagent doesn’t, ad nauseam). Because reasons.
Wrapping up
I’m not sure this warrants a conclusion. I’ve stopped detailing my experience as I was approaching the 4000 word mark. However, there are so many more things that break, run amok, break in unpredictable ways, etc. etc. etc.
I’ll leave you with these quotes:
…never have I worked in an ecosystem where the knowledge attained while becoming a master of the craft goes out of date so rapidly, or where solutions are quite so brittle.
The JS world’s obsession with small tools mean that they combine in endless permutations, causing endless issues to debug.
…
When the tower of abstractions falls down in a steaming pile and you need to figure out what’s gone wrong and fix it, you then end up sinking hours and hours into it (all the more because you don’t really understand what’s going on, because you didn’t set it up from scratch).
Or you waste a month figuring out how to plug all the tools together. If I have a complex project I know full well I’m going to want code coverage, a proper module system, minification, etc. etc. The initial time investment to investigate the options here and get it all working is faintly ridiculous compared to ecosystems like Java or .NET (or even C++, for that matter).
I’m not even going to talk about the cavalier attitude various popular parts of the ecosystem (e.g. react-router) have towards API stability.
…the JavaScript community suffers from a very serious case of NIH syndrome, compounded by a neglect for long term sustainability of software projects.
Don’t get me wrong, every single language in the 20 or so years of web development has gone through the framework phase, where people would experiment with solutions for every one of those problems.
The difference is that every one of those languages very quickly converged into good solutions and then made those good solutions into effective tools to get things done.
…
The JavaScript community, otoh, doesn’t seem to get to the converging part…
It’s been said that “Javascript fatigue” appears because developers are lazy.
It’s been said that “Javascript fatigue” is because developers don’t want to learn anything new.
These arguments are null and void…
there’s nothing lazy in trying to make your build tool work
there are exactly zero useful things to learn from that experience
The time I spent trying to figure out the exact motions of all the moving parts I could spend on learning something genuinely new.
Instead, I now have a build toolchain that I have exactly zero confidence in (because it will break unexpectedly at the very next update of any of the fourteen hundred moving parts in it).
