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npm publish lets you create something new and share it trivially and in a useful manner. This might end up being a negative in the long run, but for now it see

npm publish lets you create something new and share it trivially and in a useful manner. This might end up being a negative in the long run, but for now it seems like a huge positive.

LargeWu 13y ago
If it's trivial to create packages, I suspect we'll end up with a lot of trivial packages.
- philodespotos 13y ago
  Which is perfectly fine. I mostly want to be able to trivially use packages which solve my trivial problems, so I can move on to something more fun. The issue eventually becomes a one of search; when I'm looking for a package, how do I know which are maintained, which never picked up broad adoption, etc? Between the npm registry[1] and node-toolbox[2], there's already decent visibility into it. I often find the output of 'npm search' daunting to the point of mental paralysis, though. [1]: eg, if I need a redis client, I can see the redis project is active and broadly used: https://npmjs.org/package/redis https://npmjs.org/package/redis [2]: similarly, http://nodetoolbox.com/categories/Redis http://nodetoolbox.com/categories/Redis
- jerf 13y ago
  Now, take that observation and go back and read the original post. I'd observe that the new languages all seem to have been accelerating their rate of package production over time. This is probably because over time the set of easily-copyable packages goes up. It's much easier to release a simple Rails clone after Rails has made the idea popular. It seems like every year there's another Brilliant HTML Templating Idea, and a new language can rapidly develop clones of the entire history of HTML templating ideas, whereas one that was new ten years ago had a much thinner pool of copyable ideas. This isn't a criticism of Node (which I am certainly prone to, but this is not one of those times), this is an observation that it seems like each new language rapidly builds up packages faster than the last one and this probably isn't actually an attribute of the language.
  - lmm 13y ago
    Do you know of a wicket-like approach to "templating" in python (or indeed anything other than java)? I'm currently in the process of building my own clone in python, and I feel really bad about doing so, but it's so much better than all the approaches to html generation in python that I could find that I'd rather do this than struggle with vanilla django templates, or even genshi.

npm publish lets you create something new and share it trivially and in a useful manner. This might end up being a negative in the long run, but for now it seems like a huge positive.

LargeWu 13y ago

If it's trivial to create packages, I suspect we'll end up with a lot of trivial packages.

philodespotos 13y ago
Which is perfectly fine. I mostly want to be able to trivially use packages which solve my trivial problems, so I can move on to something more fun. The issue eventually becomes a one of search; when I'm looking for a package, how do I know which are maintained, which never picked up broad adoption, etc? Between the npm registry[1] and node-toolbox[2], there's already decent visibility into it. I often find the output of 'npm search' daunting to the point of mental paralysis, though. [1]: eg, if I need a redis client, I can see the redis project is active and broadly used: https://npmjs.org/package/redis https://npmjs.org/package/redis [2]: similarly, http://nodetoolbox.com/categories/Redis http://nodetoolbox.com/categories/Redis
jerf 13y ago
Now, take that observation and go back and read the original post. I'd observe that the new languages all seem to have been accelerating their rate of package production over time. This is probably because over time the set of easily-copyable packages goes up. It's much easier to release a simple Rails clone after Rails has made the idea popular. It seems like every year there's another Brilliant HTML Templating Idea, and a new language can rapidly develop clones of the entire history of HTML templating ideas, whereas one that was new ten years ago had a much thinner pool of copyable ideas. This isn't a criticism of Node (which I am certainly prone to, but this is not one of those times), this is an observation that it seems like each new language rapidly builds up packages faster than the last one and this probably isn't actually an attribute of the language.
- lmm 13y ago
  Do you know of a wicket-like approach to "templating" in python (or indeed anything other than java)? I'm currently in the process of building my own clone in python, and I feel really bad about doing so, but it's so much better than all the approaches to html generation in python that I could find that I'd rather do this than struggle with vanilla django templates, or even genshi.