Re:Node.js packages don't deserve trust
by jerf on Monday April 11, 2022 @10:32AM
(#30989287)
The interaction between a language and its culture is really complicated, partially because it's an ongoing iterative process, and thus chaotic, in both the English and mathematical senses of the term.
Not having a standard library made people accept needing libraries for even very small things that in most other languages developers would make at least some effort for using the standard library before reaching for something else.
I think another aspect is that the initial leadership of a language community sets the tone for a long time, but JS in a lot of ways didn't have that, not through any fault of any particular person but simply because Node grew so explosively at the beginning that the usage growth dominated the available leadership growth, and so there was a lot of very wild, woolly growth that got written into the earliest culture. This creates something a lot like a "seed crystal" that has outsized impacts on future paths for a long time.
Finally, I do think it is definitely an issue that JS is somewhere where you get a lot of people who are not "programmers" per se and they are making big decisions about code bases and libraries. They're young in the art. And while there's nothing intrinsically bad about that, people have to start somewhere, there's a lot of ways in which it's good that JS is relatively easy to get into, etc., it is also absolutely true that at scale, as the language and the libraries iterate on each other and seek out their stable points, that's going to affect the landscape. This is an "is", not an "ought". It is what it is. JS has also continued explosive growth, so even as someone who got into JS and programming for the first time in 2017 is now a 5-year "senior" (a crack about our industry terminology, not the dev here) developer who has learned and might be inclined to do things differently than they did 5 years ago, there's another 2.5 newbies "voting" in the community as well.
It's a hard problem, I salute the leaders in the JS and npm world working on it, I wis them the best and advocate people giving them grace working in a very hard situation. But I'm also glad not to be part of it.
Not having a standard library made people accept needing libraries for even very small things that in most other languages developers would make at least some effort for using the standard library before reaching for something else.
I think another aspect is that the initial leadership of a language community sets the tone for a long time, but JS in a lot of ways didn't have that, not through any fault of any particular person but simply because Node grew so explosively at the beginning that the usage growth dominated the available leadership growth, and so there was a lot of very wild, woolly growth that got written into the earliest culture. This creates something a lot like a "seed crystal" that has outsized impacts on future paths for a long time.
Finally, I do think it is definitely an issue that JS is somewhere where you get a lot of people who are not "programmers" per se and they are making big decisions about code bases and libraries. They're young in the art. And while there's nothing intrinsically bad about that, people have to start somewhere, there's a lot of ways in which it's good that JS is relatively easy to get into, etc., it is also absolutely true that at scale, as the language and the libraries iterate on each other and seek out their stable points, that's going to affect the landscape. This is an "is", not an "ought". It is what it is. JS has also continued explosive growth, so even as someone who got into JS and programming for the first time in 2017 is now a 5-year "senior" (a crack about our industry terminology, not the dev here) developer who has learned and might be inclined to do things differently than they did 5 years ago, there's another 2.5 newbies "voting" in the community as well.
It's a hard problem, I salute the leaders in the JS and npm world working on it, I wis them the best and advocate people giving them grace working in a very hard situation. But I'm also glad not to be part of it.