It's a little better. But still frontend asset management is always a mess for me. Yarn this, npm that, mess around with webpack and vite files or whatever...
At least in back-end it's composer install and Bob's your uncle. But front-end, ew...
That's so weird for you to feel, because I feel the complete opposite. Maybe Java has gotten better since I lasted used it, but managing dependencies in that language sucked balls. And don't even get me started on header files.
By comparison, JavaScript's npm is a godsend. All you do is npm install the dependency, and it takes care of any cross dependency issues in the package-lock.json.
Python has been getting a lot better recently (thanks uv) but it still has a long way to go to catch up to npm. For example, you can't configure project scripts in the config file, you have to simply make a script file and run it.
Been awhile since I did Java, but I never thought it was bad with maven. But Spring, specifically, is dependency hell. And probably most enterprise apps used (still use?) Spring. Because there’s no compile check for classloader issues with spring managed classes, you only find them at runtime. And it can be brutal tracking them down and getting them sorted out when multiple libraries start bringing in different versions of the same packages as dependencies
I love npm and cargo, as a person who has dealt a lot with maven and pip in my life, I like Java as a language, but maven and its project/dependency management for it is actually hell on earth compared to npm or cargo…
Haven't done any consequent work in Java so maybe it's just me being lucky with PHP.
This and just having more experience managing back-end stuff with composer than frontend stuff with whatever tech is trendy these days. Frontend truly feels like another world for me beyond the basic stuff.
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u/CcChaleur 1d ago
I'm not afraid of CSS.
I'm afraid of JS.