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Your argument is valid, but I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that you have to fix it, just that you can. And you/we should take advantage of t

Your argument is valid, but I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that you have to fix it, just that you can. And you/we should take advantage of that. We as developers can work together on open source projects, and make them better for everyone. It's not like closed source software where the choices are a) use a competing product or b) write our own. And by work I don't mean just writing code: writing documentation and even reporting issues is just as valuable. It seems to me that the JavaScript community is very quick to say "this is s..t, I can do better!" and throw away all the work someone has done and reimplement it from scratch. Sometimes developers take criticism very badly, so I agree it isn't always an possible to say "how about you try this", and I agree sometimes the code is beyond saving and it is better just to start afresh. But as someone who is mainly an outsider to the community, it seems like there is very much an epidemic of NIH syndrome, and people aren't even willing to try contributing. Maybe you are right about my sense of entitlement, but I do truly believe if we would work together more and be less self-centred, society would benefit greatly from it.

klodolph 10y ago
I don't think I misunderstood your point at all. Your comment here seems to be splitting hairs between whether I think that you are claiming that you "have to" fix things or whether you are claiming we "should" fix things. I don't think that the distinction between "have to" or "should" is particularly relevant. You're right that the JS community is quick to dump a project. You're also right that sometimes code is beyond saving and it's better to start afresh. As someone who claims to be an outsider to the JS community, maybe you don't understand just how broken NPM is, and how much we welcome the appearance of something like Yarn. This is the real beauty of having a separate package repository and package manager, and the beauty of open source software when it's made out of components with well-defined interfaces. Yarn can still use the NPM repository, but Yarn will suffer from far fewer of the deficiencies that NPM has. The exact same thing has happened in other communities many times. Haskell went from Cabal to Stack, Python went from easy_install to pip, and most Linux distros have been through their fair share of package managers. As someone who has personally migrated from Cabal to Stack and from easy_install to pip, the change from NPM to Yarn seems familiar. Or in other words, the replacement of NPM (the package manager) with Yarn is a healthy thing that is happening for good reasons (because reporting issues, writing documentation, and submitting PRs will not make NPM do what you want, and saying that we "should" do those things is wrong).

klodolph 10y ago

I don't think I misunderstood your point at all. Your comment here seems to be splitting hairs between whether I think that you are claiming that you "have to" fix things or whether you are claiming we "should" fix things. I don't think that the distinction between "have to" or "should" is particularly relevant. You're right that the JS community is quick to dump a project. You're also right that sometimes code is beyond saving and it's better to start afresh. As someone who claims to be an outsider to the JS community, maybe you don't understand just how broken NPM is, and how much we welcome the appearance of something like Yarn. This is the real beauty of having a separate package repository and package manager, and the beauty of open source software when it's made out of components with well-defined interfaces. Yarn can still use the NPM repository, but Yarn will suffer from far fewer of the deficiencies that NPM has. The exact same thing has happened in other communities many times. Haskell went from Cabal to Stack, Python went from easy_install to pip, and most Linux distros have been through their fair share of package managers. As someone who has personally migrated from Cabal to Stack and from easy_install to pip, the change from NPM to Yarn seems familiar. Or in other words, the replacement of NPM (the package manager) with Yarn is a healthy thing that is happening for good reasons (because reporting issues, writing documentation, and submitting PRs will not make NPM do what you want, and saying that we "should" do those things is wrong).