What am I working on lately?

Mostly ReadAlongs Web (or see the demo). Things I’ve learned along the way are:

• Dependency management in the JavaScript world is, as they say, a real hell, and somehow even worse than in the Python world, which seems to have made great strides in cleaning up its act with regard to packaging.
• Package lockfiles do not really help. Perhaps there will be a full-fledged “opinion piece” on this later.
• Webpack, for all the complaining it attracts, is a mature and well-maintained piece of software that really tries hard to do the right thing, and we should be kind to it.
• Too many so-called “frameworks” in this so-called “ecosystem”. Most JavaScript-related project webpages are 80% hype, 10% rows and rows of icons for other projects, and 10% buzzwords.
• Angular, for all the complaining it attracts, is fairly good, if only because it does not use JSX/TSX templating, which is deeply distasteful, or any other weird magic, with the exception of sigh dependency injection, which is thoroughly unnecessary. Explicit is always better than implicit (says the Python programmer).
• There are few problems solved by ReactiveX that can’t be solved async, await, and generators, and those ones are probably not worth solving.

This is all in preparation for our very exciting workshop which will be presented (virtually) at ICLDC!

Aside from that … stay tuned for various WFST-related things in your browser. More to come.