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by munificent 1814 days ago
I agree with all of this. Also JavaScript's "standard library" is nearly nonexistent (or at least was when Node first got big). That built a culture of people assuming they needed to reach for third-party dependencies for nearly everything (see: leftpad).
1 comments

Slightly related to the lack of a standard library is that a lot of these 3rd party packages come from random people in the community. It’s great that people are so willing and able to share code, but it also means that as a community we put a lot of trust into code that may not be vetted or funded properly. I think we assume that because these packages are open source that someone is making sure they are safe to consume, but because there’s so many of them it’s hard to verify them.
You only support corporately funded open source?
That’s not at all what I said. C/C++, Python, and Rust are examples of languages that are not owned by a single company yet they are funded enough to be able to provide a stable standard library.