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by cxr 1288 days ago
It's funny. The issue described (inability to replicate the conditions to build and/or run the original program using NPM) is something that gets brought up a lot, but people will appear who are downright adamant that it's not a problem. Not just that it's not prevalent enough to be concerned about, but that they've literally never seen it happen ever. We're living in completely separate worlds.

And let's be clear: this is an *NPMJS* problem, not a *JS* problem. For folks who have read and written lots of JS before and during NPM's reign over programmers' attention and will continue to do so afterward (when NPM as the dominant culture evaporates) and have kept NPM- and NodeJS-inspired "best practices" at arms length precisely for these reasons and more, it's irksome to see people full-on equate JS with what-the-NPMers-are-doing.
2 comments
robinsonb5 1288 days ago
You're right that it's not the language per se, but I'd argue that it's not specifically NPM either - the same problems afflict any rapidly-moving not-yet-fully-mature software ecosystem. The whole tale definitely reminded me of the pain of trying to build projects in C and C++ from source in the early 2000s, with GNU Autotools everywhere, and before pkg_config was common. I've had similar "side quest" frustrations (I really like that description from the parent post!) more recently when python's involved.

But I guess NPM's particularly prone to it due to the sheer number of interdependent packages. I can't quite wrap my head around there being one npm package for every 6,100 human beings on the planet.

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onionisafruit 1288 days ago
This article reminded me of my days as a sysadmin in the 90s. It seemed like every new system had a fresh issue with getting some shared library right.
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rjzzleep 1288 days ago
Of course it's a JS problem. "Programs" being replaced by JavaScript apps doesn't mean some custom homegrown LTS framework. It means apps that aim to replace what used to be known as "Programs" have some sort of frontend JS component. frontend JS doesn't mean npm.js sure, but it means whatever flavour of bower is hot today, webpack or the other new kids on the block, react or other stuff. There is a reason why these big companies hire unlimited amounts of frontend devs. If you leave a react apps dependencies half a year and then try to update it none of it will work. It's "less" bad than it was 2 years go, but it's extremely cost-intensive to maintain nonetheless.

But it's not like backend js is any better. Most people run express.js in some shape of form, but then people roll their own (or use any of the existing 50) input sanitizing libraries and then half of those projects run into the same authentication bugs that Rails fixed almost a decade ago. There's a reason why people don't ask for JavaScript experience, but instead ask for Node.js experience in resumes.

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cxr 1287 days ago
> Of course it's a JS problem.

I've already explained why it isn't, in detail.

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