[tannhaeuser]

Excuse me, but what's this "bad ecosystem in npm" you're talking about? Every single JS lib, pipeline tool, framework is on npmjs.com (react, webpack, bootstrap, expressjs, and 100'000s others). It's the ecosystem that every contender would love to be.

And the lack of a "stdlib" is exactly how and why npm started over ten years ago, via the community-driven CommonJs initiative (JSCI, connect/express.js, the package.json format, middlewares, etc). The idea being that the core packages on npmjs.com are the stdlib on top of what Node.js/CommonJs provides.

[Octoth0rpe]

> Every single JS lib, pipeline tool, framework is on npmjs.com (react, webpack, bootstrap, expressjs, and 100'000s others). It's the ecosystem that every contender would love to be.

This is only a strength if you accept that those libs (and their dependencies, and their dependencies' dependencies, and so on...) are adequately scanned for malicious behavior. If you don't accept that, then the incredibly deep dependency graph that is typical of frontend projects these days is a liability.

[tannhaeuser]

While that's true, this is really orthogonal to the argument. Especially since Deno's API is also anemic, as complained about elsewhere in this thread.

[mmbleh]

> It's the ecosystem that every contender would love to be.

Trying to clarify - do you mean other JS ecosystems? Outside of JS, NPM is usually used as what not to do, not as an aspiration.

[doteka]

Could you share some examples of ecosystems that are 1) vibrant and active 2) have working, open source, ergonomic tooling of a comparable caliber to VSCode, typescript and friends 3) can target almost any platform, including but not limited to server, mobile, desktop and web?

I’m trying hard to think of any, Java and Python come closest but both fall short.

[HelloNurse]

There are vibrant and active communities around good projects, but npm is the greatest known repository of abandoned, obsolete, not very good and potentially malicious libraries. The bad scales up along with the good; great tools on npm don't make the Leftpad fiasco more forgivable or technical shortcomings less bad.

[doteka]

Fair enough, but I have no idea how that can be avoided if we take Sturgeon’s Law as a given: 90% of everything is garbage.

I’d argue an essential quality in a modern software engineer is ‘good taste in dependencies’, if you will. Adding a dependency for padding a string with whitespace would have gotten you a friendly but stern lecture from a senior dev, in every good team I’ve been a part of so far.