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It's not incompetence; there's quite literally no other real solution. The sprawl of the npm ecosystem is a result of there being (essentially) no standard libr

It's not incompetence; there's quite literally no other real solution. The sprawl of the npm ecosystem is a result of there being (essentially) no standard library in JavaScript and an intentionally small one in Node.js. As a result, simple problems have to be solved in userspace. Your application can intentionally choose only to depend on a small number of libraries, but of course those libraries will need to consume other libraries, and so on, and you rapidly end up with hundreds of dependencies in node_modules. If we wanted to solve this, we could introduce a comprehensive standard library. However, we'd need it to be bundled with every existing browser (and Node.js), which is likely why it hasn't happened.

austincheney 6y ago
> The sprawl of the npm ecosystem is a result of there being (essentially) no standard library You finish that statement with a phrase completely at odds with this part about no standard library. After having written applications using Node for a decade now I have learned to see the real problem is developers not wanting to write or own original code. No standard library will be comprehensive enough to fix that.
moojd 6y ago
The lack of a standard library is definitively a major factor and the way npm solves the Diamond Dependency Problem exacerbates the issue by an order of magnitude. Not only is everyone pulling in dozens of packages that do simple things, you also end up pulling in dozens of versions of each of those packages because package developers aren't forced to flatten their dependency trees. And since no one is forced to do do this, using something like 'yarn install --flat' yourself is a huge pain. If we had a proper standard library and a sane package manager with flat dependency resolution by default, bundling just the parts of the standard library we need for the web would be easy (browserify has existed for a long time).

austincheney 6y ago

> The sprawl of the npm ecosystem is a result of there being (essentially) no standard library You finish that statement with a phrase completely at odds with this part about no standard library. After having written applications using Node for a decade now I have learned to see the real problem is developers not wanting to write or own original code. No standard library will be comprehensive enough to fix that.

moojd 6y ago

The lack of a standard library is definitively a major factor and the way npm solves the Diamond Dependency Problem exacerbates the issue by an order of magnitude. Not only is everyone pulling in dozens of packages that do simple things, you also end up pulling in dozens of versions of each of those packages because package developers aren't forced to flatten their dependency trees. And since no one is forced to do do this, using something like 'yarn install --flat' yourself is a huge pain. If we had a proper standard library and a sane package manager with flat dependency resolution by default, bundling just the parts of the standard library we need for the web would be easy (browserify has existed for a long time).