I think it is ok to express displeasure at the state of something without just silently doing something else and hoping that the entire ecosystem catches up to you. For example, I take every opportunity (like right now, for example) to shit on node.js and npm for that very reason. There is so much evangelism on one side, it is nice to hear the opposing view points.

> I think it is ok to express displeasure at the state of something without just silently doing something else and hoping that the entire ecosystem catches up to you.

It is, but it's not okay to bring up a common flame war topic and then say "but I don't want to start a flame war". If you don't want to start one, just don't start one. Starting it, and then saying you didn't want to, is disingenuous at best.

It's a legitimate thing to mention as being displeased about. The very fact that it's such a hot topic demonstrates that, since it indicates that it's a subject over which smart people can disagree.

The "I don't want to start a flamewar" bit is also a reasonable addendum. It's a terse way of saying, "I don't like this feature, but, people who disagree with me, please don't get up in arms about this, you're free to like this feature if you want."

Frankly, if there's anyone trying to start a flamewar, it's not the original poster; it's people who are edging toward caping up in response to OP's (quite mild) comment.

Ok, so what are some legit criticisms of node.js and npm? I'm no fanboy, but every time I try to ask this, the answers are along the lines of "if you install packages in a different order, you get different results." Which is fair, but everybody installs using `npm i`, so that's mostly a moot point.

Is there any substance here?

I think it's fair to talk about this, as long as we go out of our way not to reduce it to flamewar territory. The app is built on Electron, after all.

Maybe avoid mentioning memory usage, since that point has been done to death.

What counts as a legit criticism? So much of our field is taste-driven. And so much criticism was aimed at old iterations of something, gets carried on in flamewars, but no longer applies to the latest version (e.g. "Java is slow").

All the JS-the-language criticisms apply, those are probably the biggest at this point. The classic "node.js is cancer" is still somewhat relevant though I never thought it made its point well enough on how forced-asynchronous is at least as bad as the forced OOP and checked exceptions we put up with in e.g. Java again. Callback hell was long a common complaint, until people found Promises / the waterfall structure, but then the complaint is debugging hell. The new await stuff in node 8 sounds nice at least.

For a long time npm didn't get stuff over https by default, I think it does for a year now? The only other criticisms I can think of are just shoddy engineering that turns into drama (I remember seeing something about their colorized output would slow everything down quite a lot) or more taste-level things like how seemingly trivial concepts like leftpad are core libraries (that go through multiple versions because it couldn't have just been done right the first time) and the drama involved when something everyone depends on has an issue.

Disclaimer, I haven't done production node since ~2013. It was actually mostly enjoyable, and I wouldn't mind doing it again, despite on the taste-level I think the whole node ecosystem is just worse than many other options (when you have a choice) for many specific problems. But life is a continuous lesson in Worse is Better.

One drawback of Node.js is that it's single threaded. Moreover, even if somehow it became multithreaded today, JS is absolutely not ready for that. (Btw. yes, async I/O is nice, but threads are useful for more than just I/O.)

NPM is quite basic, it pretty much just downloads tarballs recursively from a webserver according to some version spec. The CommonJS module format is fairly loose (and kind of outlived its usefulnes) and so there's no agreed upon package structure and everyone just does whatever they feel like doing, which leads to a huge overall mess. The whole ecosystem is fragmented and very few things are really agreed-upon.

> NPM is quite basic, it pretty much just downloads tarballs recursively from a webserver according to some version spec

This is about as valuable as "Rails is a webserver that responds to some HTTP verbs". Common.js isn't even a part of npm (the correct capitalization) or node.

> Common.js isn't even a part of npm (the correct capitalization) or node.

I never said it was, it's not part of it per se, but it's the 'blessed' module/package system on Node.js (the correct capitalization). Which is really sad, because CommonJS is retarded (a file has to actually be executed in order to get it's require & export characteristics and they might arbitrarily change in runtime). It's sad that Node.js as well as the JS ecosystem in general is fairly hostile towards ES6 modules - basically any current support of ES6 modules is just translating then / dumbing them down back to CJS. Hopefully this'll change in the future as ES6 gets more adopted and CommonJS will be left to rot (a fate it deserves and should've already met ages ago).

A mature framework should not have this kind of problems https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/12115

I don't want to start a flamewar, either, but I'm glad that the top poster mentioned that it's an electron app. Having that knowledge ahead of time allows me to manage my expectations.