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by perilunar 1513 days ago
Not Javascript's dependency problem, but NPM's dependency problem. You don't need to use NPM to build things in JS — it's perfectly feasible to manually load just the scripts you need, and avoid build steps, frameworks, and dependencies.
1 comments
codecurve 1513 days ago
Doesn't feel unreasonable to conflate the two. npm is the dominant way to handle dependencies for frontend and backend, even some of the most popular script-tag delivery CDNs are powered by npm (unpkg, skypack).

Coincidentally one of my previous posts was about a no tool approach. https://danthedev.com/web-dev-without-tools/

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perilunar 1513 days ago
> npm is the dominant way to handle dependencies

Precisely. Which is why it's NPM's dependency problem, not JS's. Avoid NPM and no dependency problems (well, fewer anyway).

Liked your no tool article, but I laughed at this bit: "Traditionally, using other people's code has required some combination of npm and yarn to download those modules". NPM is only 12 years old (and Yarn is newer) — that's less than half the age of JS. No, 'traditionally' you just viewed the source and copied the code you wanted, or went to a project page and downloaded the script.

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