Paul, most of what you said actually supports my anguish over the "lottery" of kits, tools, packages and "standards" (ha!) and fads in the JavaScript ecosystem.
Over the last week or more since I expressed my dismay, I've been reading more and more about the zoo of frameworks that decorate JavaScript and attempt to hoist it up into the world of "real languages". It's getting so stupid that the AngularJS seems to have decided to completely rewrite it for v2 using TypeScript, and someone got upset and split off to make Aurelia because it was more "pure", but apparently they're friends again now, I think. It's worse than a zoo, it's like a steaming compost bin. I got all excited about TypeScript last weekend and I spent an afternoon reading about it and fiddling to see if it has promise. So I create a new HTML project and I get one small source file that shows the time. The sample code is raw JS from the 90s and I have to go looking for a way to integrate jQuery and/or AngularJS into the project. So dozens of opinionated pages later I discover I just about have to reinvent the steam engine to try an integrate them, and there are literally dozens of experts all claiming they know they best way to do it, with all sorts of cryptic pseudo-functional coding tricks. I simply want to know how to structure a large TS project, but there is no reliable guidance anywhere, it's just a dogs breakfast. This is what happens when a script becomes accidentally promoted to become the new fangled language to drive LOB apps in the web without proper planning by industry experts and academics. There are no conventions for code or project structure, references, dependencies, building, testing ... anything! ... it's just a bottomless kludge of more tools made in JavaScript to try and make itself look and behave sensibly. I am now overwhelmed by despair at what damage JavaScript has done to software development in the 21st century. I know there are lots of younger developers out there who shrug and think "what's so bad, it's working", but I think they're just used to suffering and take it for granted. *Greg* List of JavaScript Libraries <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JavaScript_libraries>
