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JavaScript itself has gone through about a 10-year transition period from a toy language for writing quick scripts to a full-on general-purpose programming lang
by brundolf 6y ago
JavaScript itself has gone through about a 10-year transition period from a toy language for writing quick scripts to a full-on general-purpose programming language. It didn't even have a module system when Node launched.
So I strongly doubt the next 10 years will be anywhere near as tumultuous as the past 10. It's very possible that right now is just a much better time to be establishing a JS runtime.
- girvo 6y agoPart of me almost misses `browserify` -- the heady days of "Node modules are the One True Way", with all the constraints that implied. Got a lot done with it and related tooling back then!
- brundolf 6y agoCommonJS worked well enough for lots of things, and it was neat that it was so simple (no new syntax!) But it had limitations, chiefly that imports/exports were not static. Things got imported at runtime when they got reached, etc. This meant that things like browserify were fudging the semantics in some ways, and it also made it impossible to properly do tree-shaking. The stricter semantics of ES modules are better IMO, despite the pain of transitioning.