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That's a more charitable (and more reassuring) interpretation than "developers don't know the modulo operator". That said, it still leaves a sour taste as this

That's a more charitable (and more reassuring) interpretation than "developers don't know the modulo operator". That said, it still leaves a sour taste as this effectively implies that a certain set of JS developers is very happy to abuse their (maybe initially rightfully earned) prestige to gain even more prestige while leaving behind a mess for the whole ecosystem. I don't understand why this is tolerated. The Node community needs to have a serious discussion about why certain packages are allowed to spread garbage, create forks of the relevant packages that rip out "is-even" etc. and then eventually converge to these forks. But to this day, I don't see the community taking this problem seriously enough. Now, supply chain attacks and "too many dependencies" are a potential issue for every language with dependency management (see also log4j, etc.), but no other ecosystem seems to be have such a high frequency of issues and (widely used) "is-even" packages are simply not a thing in any other mainstream language (some languages, like Swift, include similar functionality in the standard library, which is totally fair).

ratww 4y ago
The reason it is tolerated is because the philosophy of "thousands of small packages" has spread far and wide. For every person calling it out like we're doing here, there are ten others praising maintainers able to whip ten semi-useless packages per week. It's not just random maintainers making small packages. The core infrastructure of Javascript is in it. Babel is made of hundreds of packages, which all live on the same repository (because of course the maintainers don't want the hassle of maintaining multiple things). Some of those packages don't even have anything of importance in it, just metadata, a couple flags and some boilerplate [1]. The package is just a way of organizing code. Webpack, ESLint and others aren't exactly better. EDIT: And of course I got downvoted :) [1] https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/main/packages/babel-plugin-syntax-decimal/src/index.ts https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/main/packages/babel-plug...
- cxr 4y ago
  You're tacitly giving the people you despise leverage when you say things like: > The core infrastructure of Javascript is in it. Babel[...] Babel is not core JS infrastructure. It may be close to fundamental to the modern NodeJS development experience, but JS exists happily (and capably) without any of that stuff (including package.json, for that matter).
  - ratww 4y ago
    Fair enough! True, Babel is only "core" for a subset of JS developers, not for the language. I don't really despise anyone in Babel, though, I'm only criticising their packaging method. Babel isn't doing the million-packages thing to gain popularity.

ratww 4y ago

The reason it is tolerated is because the philosophy of "thousands of small packages" has spread far and wide. For every person calling it out like we're doing here, there are ten others praising maintainers able to whip ten semi-useless packages per week. It's not just random maintainers making small packages. The core infrastructure of Javascript is in it. Babel is made of hundreds of packages, which all live on the same repository (because of course the maintainers don't want the hassle of maintaining multiple things). Some of those packages don't even have anything of importance in it, just metadata, a couple flags and some boilerplate [1]. The package is just a way of organizing code. Webpack, ESLint and others aren't exactly better. EDIT: And of course I got downvoted :) [1] https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/main/packages/babel-plugin-syntax-decimal/src/index.ts https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/main/packages/babel-plug...

cxr 4y ago
You're tacitly giving the people you despise leverage when you say things like: > The core infrastructure of Javascript is in it. Babel[...] Babel is not core JS infrastructure. It may be close to fundamental to the modern NodeJS development experience, but JS exists happily (and capably) without any of that stuff (including package.json, for that matter).
- ratww 4y ago
  Fair enough! True, Babel is only "core" for a subset of JS developers, not for the language. I don't really despise anyone in Babel, though, I'm only criticising their packaging method. Babel isn't doing the million-packages thing to gain popularity.