[quintex]

As someone who only had just gotten into front end programming after years of backend work, npm has been a nightmare. I haven't experienced the same level of frustration with other package managers (pip, cargo, go mod, etc) as I have with npm.

Is yarn the better option? What is our path forward?

[SahAssar]

I think the problem is not really NPM it's the way that mainstream frontend development requires very wide and deep dependencies. If you stick to using smaller frameworks and libraries without heavy build tools then it's not much of a problem.

[mrweasel]

I basically do no frontend development, partly due to tools npm and the current frameworks, I simply cannot wrap my head around it. I do help run a few modern javascript application however. Even a minimal app will pull in 1000+ dependecies, and I think that’s the problem.

It simply don’t happen in Python, Go or Rust (or even Java) because the languages comes with a rich standard library. Javascript comes with just the basics, everything else is a dependency. It’s not uncommon for people to audit their dependencies in Python or Go, but you pull in maybe 10 or 20. A basic Javascript app easily pull in 100 times that, how are you suppose to deal with that?

[bscphil]

> Rust

This has not been my experience at all. Most Rust developers unfortunately seem quite happy to adopt modern programming bad practices. (There are many exceptions, of course.)

Example: I went with the first Rust program I could find installed on my computer, tealdeer. It's a dead simple program: run `tldr progname` and it will print a handful of examples of how to run `progname` in your terminal. Run `tldr --update` and it will download the latest version of the database containing these examples from a web server.

To build this extremely basic CLI program, I need ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN distinct crates.

[protonimitate]

I've been having a good experience with pnpm lately. It's not a silver bullet but it addresses some pain points with npm/yarn.

[nih0]

same xd, npm even managed to make me appreciate maven and gradle

[vbezhenar]

I think that there's difference between Java and JS landscapes.

Java has rich standard library. Some would say - too rich. But anyway - very few people would need customized collections, standard library covers all the needs. And where it does not cover all the needs, there are few commonly accepted additions like apache-commons or google guava. So that one solves `leftpad`-like issues.

Another difference is that Java is old. Most needs were covered by many libraries and few libraries survived which are good enough. It's again some commonly accepted wisdom, so you don't really need to search for many options. You have one good enough option that you'll use and move on.

So it's not about maven/gradle vs npm, it's more about ecosystems. I don't think that porting maven to JS world would change anything.

[zkldi]

PNPM[1] has became a must-use for me in every node project I work on now.

[1]: https://pnpm.io/