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I feel this is proved false by history, if npm wasn't needed because everything was fine, it wouldn't have flourished.

• krapp 8y ago
  You seem to assume that all successful projects succeed on their own merit in a fair market, but that's not always the case. NPM's success is due in large part to enterprise investment and hype. Part of the reason for enterprise investment is controlling costs by not having to train or recruit developers for another language besides Javascript, which was already commonplace. And even if NPM did solve a needed problem, better solutions cannot be considered due to those entrenched business interests and the extreme centralization of the javascript community, not because NPM is already the best possible solution to whatever problems it claims to solve. JQuery was revolutionary in its own time, but you didn't see a JQuery Foundation serving all JQuery plugins from a closed repository through a buggy package manager that everyone was expected to use. It is possible to innovate and not monopolize, but what NPM has done, at best, is monopolize innovation and stop it dead in its tracks.
• nacs 8y ago
  It flourished because it is installed by default and thus became the defacto standard. There is a talk from Nodejs' creator where he mentions one of his biggest regrets about Node is that he made NPM the default.