There's a kind of debugging I call "flailing"—a desperate, theory-less "jiggling the handle" one can stumble into after extended failure. Found myself there today on hour 3 of JS build system BS. In such situations I find Pirsig's treatise on "gumption traps" a good antidote.
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If Bob had known about webpack it would have been called Zen and the Art of Website Maintenance.
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My grief today was indeed caused by Webpack. The solution to my grief was moving to Rollup, which also required a configuration file about 1/4 the length.
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Bob would tell you that Webpack and Rollup are both expressions of the same underlying property. Your decision to switch was a form of Quality. The act of switching from Webpack to Rollup moved you from a pattern of static Quality to the knife-edge of dynamic Quality.
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Replying to
I really like that I can't tell if you're joking.
“Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.”
Remarkably, he also knew about JavaScript tree shaking in 1973.
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