JavaScript is part of the HTML standard so I'm ok with that. What I'm not OK with is the expectation that I'm going to run 20 tools between editing a file and refreshing my browser.
They are saying that they aren't going to make the CLI a requirement and I hope that's the case, but my concern is that "use the CLI" is going to become the quick answer.
But that's the beauty of Ember: you run one tool. `ember`. Sure it uses Babel under the hood and a CSS preprocessor, but they are not separate tools really.
But what exactly is wrong with a CLI? I'm sorry but I really don't get your point. I mean, you kind of have to run one or more anyway if you want to do modern JS development because the JS you write isn't the JS that gets served to the browser (and for good reason). A CLI is a requirement and has been for a while now.
> A CLI is a requirement and has been for a while now.
It's really not, you can get by fine with a text editor and a web browser only. You can use regular web components (works unmodified in Chrome, there's a polyfill for other browsers) and get modularity and all of the things you need. You can add Polymer which, again, doesn't require anything but an editor and a browser.
Do you combine and minify your code? If so, how—presumably a command-line tool? It's totally fine to say that you'd prefer to keep your dependencies fairly minimal, but pinning that on whether you use a CLI or not seems a false dichotomy from here. The question is how much tooling and what it does for you, versus what it gives you. There is no doubt a real tradeoff there; there are costs to something like Ember CLI and there's no reason everyone should think those costs are worth embracing in every instance. But to be sure, there are upsides: being able to write ES2015, being able to pull in tests automatically, being able to run your entire test suite against the entire app without needing to write any glue to do that yourself... those things do have value, even if they're not particularly appealing to you. And all of those quite comfortably use the official specs to get that work done.
That said, someone could probably code a locally hosted react app that wrapped the CLI, and also indicated/logged what commands were run, output, errors, etc.
I love CLI, I live in vim and tmux as much as I can, but I think point and click interfaces are better for discovery, whereas a command line interface is better for reproducibility and therefore instructional learning.
They are saying that they aren't going to make the CLI a requirement and I hope that's the case, but my concern is that "use the CLI" is going to become the quick answer.