I suggest a different narrative. That node.js achieved the decades-old aspiration of fine-grain software reuse... and has some technical debt around building t

I suggest a different narrative. That node.js achieved the decades-old aspiration of fine-grain software reuse... and has some technical debt around building the social and technical infrastructure to support that. Fine-grain sharing gracefully at scale, is a hard technical and social challenge. A harder challenge than CPAN faced, and addressed so imperfectly. But whereas the Perl community was forced to struggle over years to build it's own infrastructure - purpose-built infrastructure - node.js was able to take a different path. A story goes, that node.js almost didn't get an npm, but for someone's suggestion "don't be python" (which struggled for years). It built a minimum-viable database, and leaned heavily on github. The community didn't develop the same focus on, and control over, its own communal infrastructure tooling. And now faces the completely unsurprising costs of that tradeoff. Arguably behind time, due to community structure and governance challenges. Let's imagine you were creating a powerful new language. Having paragraph- and line-granularity community sharing could well be a worthwhile goal. Features like multiple dispatch and dependent types and DSLs and collaborative compilation... could permit far finer-grain sharing than even the node.js ecosystem manages. But you would never think npm plus github sufficient infrastructure to support it. Except perhaps in some early community-bootstrap phase.