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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   a compile has huge consequences on morale
Wednesday, June 26 2019
I got out of bed a little after 6:00am this morning, which is early even by my standards. Once I'm up, I'm up, so I brushed my teeth, put on my clothes, and drove to work. I didn't take Ramona because Neville would be staying home today. Ominously, there was a tender spot similar to that of a sore throat in the back of my mouth. Oddly, though, the painful spot was on my gum near the right hinge of my jaw, very close to where a crown recently crumbled and fell off. Later in the day, I would experience a feeling like perhaps thick mucous was forming and sliding out of the back of my sinuses like a slow-moving mountain glacier.

I go through phases with the Angular framework (I was using version 7.X in my Electron app, but now with this application I am adding a module to, I am using version 5.2). For the most part I fucking hate Angular, though occasionally (at least with version 7.0) I found things to like, such particularly the ease with which it connects the DOM (particularly forms) to application state. This morning, though, as I realized that a component in the existing app that really should've been generic was most certainly not, my hatred for Angular reached a new height. If I'd been able to debug quickly (as one can do in a properly interpreted language, that is, one for which there is no waiting for compilation), this might not've been a big problem. One of vanilla Javascript's great virtues is that it runs almost everywhere and the effects of changes can be immediately seen. But this is not the case with Angular, which has managed to blot out nearly all the joys of web development, replacing it with grim drudgery. The fact that no change can be seen until after a compile has huge consequences on morale and focus. It's one of the reasons I listen to so much YouTube at work. It's something to do, but one can never really develop " flow" when working this way. And I can't imagine I am all that different from all the other developers working with Angular. For that reason alone, apps developed in Angular (or any other framework requiring compilation) will never have the magic of an app developed in a responsive development environment.
When I'm feeling this way, I often seek validation on the web. Today I found such a good source of validation that I had to share it with my colleague Marc, who shares my general feeling about Javascript frameworks (which, in summary, is "they make things hard that are easy while 'fixing' things that really don't need fixing"). It's a whole article hating on Angular and doesn't spend more than a moment on my specific gripes.
That article alerted me for the first time to the fact that Angular has two different compilation modes, one that happens ahead of time (AOT) and one that happens just in time (JIT). The latter is intended only for debugging, and allows through all sorts of errors that AOT would flag and refuse to compile. Sure enough, the compiler I'd been using for the Angular code in my Electron app had been JIT. After eventually figuring out how to get an AOT compile to happen (it's not the default!), my app, which had taken months to develop, collapsed in a pile of error. Fortunately, most of these errors were from me making all the methods in the main form controller private. It seems that, for these to be used by the template that renders the form, they have to be public (protected will not do). I did not know that.

This afternoon, I walked into the center of Red Hook to get a key reproduced at the hardware store and to also buy some provisions at Sipperley's Grog Shoppe. I wanted vermouth for the laboratory so my vodka and gin drinking could perhaps become a bit more elegant. And I also wanted a big bottle of white wine for this weekend; Gretchen would be in California, so it was looking like (if my health held up) I'd be doing some alone-drinking.

Back at the house, a powerful storm blew through as Gretchen and I were preparing our spaghetti dinner (it included fried tempeh and sauteed onions). This storm managed to kill the power twice and the internet once. In hopes of preserving my health, I took a bath, drank an enormous amount of orange juice, and went to bed early.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190626

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