Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by asnrk 2706 days ago
Experience at the agency I worked at until a couple months ago, which had continually followed this pattern with projects started after the yarn/npm split got serious:

1) Start or inherit a project using Yarn because that's what all the cool kids are using.

2) Develop for a while, everything's fine.

3) Lose a whole day when you eventually stumble on a Yarn bug or missing feature in Yarn.

4) Angrily switch the project to NPM, solving the problem immediately.

5) Continue developing as usual.

I think this happened on like half a dozen projects after the yarn/npm split occurred, and I saw it happen as recently as Fall 2018. Developers leaned trend-chasing there, but after being burned several times even the trend-chasier ones were tepid on yarn and tended to accept that if they started with it they'd probably end up switching before long.

FWIW I don't like npm much, but I still default to it so I don't, inevitably, hit the above situation at some point. Yarn doesn't provide enough benefits to make it worth having an even less-trustworthy tool in my build process than npm already is.

[EDIT] TL;DR: We all got sick of ending up on open GH issues for Yarn when trying to track down build and, worse still, run-time problems. So we started favoring NPM again as the lower (though far from zero) headache option.