3 ms·

I agree that JS is missing a lot of standard library features that libraries like lodash or underscore have tried to backfill and the proliferation of libraries

I agree that JS is missing a lot of standard library features that libraries like lodash or underscore have tried to backfill and the proliferation of libraries in npm is a cause for concern but is that enough to call an entire runtime's ecosystem obsolete or unwanted? I just find it hard (however biased I may be) that we can just say "Node has all these problems, let's throw it out" when it's helped lower the barrier to entry for new people programming at-large.

krapp 7y ago
>I just find it hard (however biased I may be) that we can just say "Node has all these problems, let's throw it out" when it's helped lower the barrier to entry for new people programming at-large. This seems to assume that it would be impossible to design a better package manager which also provides a low barrier to entry. Bear in mind, however, that all you actually need to write javascript and learn programming with it at a basic level is a text editor. The low barrier that NPM provides is for publishing to NPM, which needn't be synonymous with "javascript development." Your comment also seems to assume that the barrier to entry everywhere else is prohibitively high, but plenty of people still learn with Ruby or Python or other languages. There are whole industries for teaching new programmers.
smt88 7y ago
I actually disagree that it's lowered the barrier. JS is a hard language with lots of "wtf" behavior and weird runtime errors. You need lots of discipline to write code without tons of runtime errors, and beginners don't even know what they need to be disciplined about. I'd argue that JS raises the barrier because lots of beginners now think it's normal to have a bizarre type system where null is an object, to have a complex Webpack/Babel setup just to use new-ish language features, and to have to constantly hit "run" to debug code. Most previous-gen web languages also have lots of gotchas, but something like Go, Kotlin, or Dart would be a much more sane beginner language.

krapp 7y ago

>I just find it hard (however biased I may be) that we can just say "Node has all these problems, let's throw it out" when it's helped lower the barrier to entry for new people programming at-large. This seems to assume that it would be impossible to design a better package manager which also provides a low barrier to entry. Bear in mind, however, that all you actually need to write javascript and learn programming with it at a basic level is a text editor. The low barrier that NPM provides is for publishing to NPM, which needn't be synonymous with "javascript development." Your comment also seems to assume that the barrier to entry everywhere else is prohibitively high, but plenty of people still learn with Ruby or Python or other languages. There are whole industries for teaching new programmers.

smt88 7y ago

I actually disagree that it's lowered the barrier. JS is a hard language with lots of "wtf" behavior and weird runtime errors. You need lots of discipline to write code without tons of runtime errors, and beginners don't even know what they need to be disciplined about. I'd argue that JS raises the barrier because lots of beginners now think it's normal to have a bizarre type system where null is an object, to have a complex Webpack/Babel setup just to use new-ish language features, and to have to constantly hit "run" to debug code. Most previous-gen web languages also have lots of gotchas, but something like Go, Kotlin, or Dart would be a much more sane beginner language.