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by throwitaway1123 904 days ago
> It implies that the JS ecosystem is well known for behavior just like the InfluxDB example - its the benchmark example of such behavior. That was my point.

To me it implies that rather than self reflecting and admitting that other ecosystems have their own continuity problems, developers would rather respond with these tired tropes about npm. Sometimes a technology or ecosystem gains a bad initial reputation, and because of the tribalism that's so prevalent in tech, it's hard to dispel these tropes. Before JS it was PHP that was the butt of every joke, despite PHP making massive strides in usability, performance, and security. It took years for developers to stop thinking of PHP as a "fractal of bad design" [1]. JS is struggling with these same reputation problems. But I'm not sure if that random HN comment even warrants this much discussion — it's not like the author provided any actual examples.

> "It hasn't advanced significantly because the JS ecosystem wants to restart every time it gets difficult".

> but at the end of the day, the actual progress has been very slow.

I think you're drastically overestimating the scale of these changes. React hasn't "restarted". You act like the React developers decided to throw out the whole api and add Vue/Svelte style templates or something.

The InfluxDB example I gave you is actually a much better fit for your criticism. A database is nothing if you can't query it, so changing the query language twice is much closer to restarting. And given that they've reintroduced the original query language from version 1 in version 3, not only is actual progress slow, but it's actually a regression rather than a progression. This would be the equivalent of React deprecating hooks, and going back to class components after spending years promoting hooks.

> In fact if I look at my hacker news history, I was probably arguing the opposite side quite a bit until 2-3 years ago. For me it was probably trying out Rust.

Rust is cool and I like that the Rust developers are trying something innovative with the borrow checker, but I don't find my self pining for the rust development experience after having played with it for a bit.

- The compile times can be horrendous.

- Cross compiling is much more complex compared to Go.

- The standard library is lacking a bit (which says a lot coming from a JS developer). I don't expect every language to ship with an http server like JS and Go do, but I remember needing to pull in third party crates for simple things like making an http request, or calculating the shasum of a file. One of the most popular libraries for making http requests has 49 dependencies [2]. The entire async runtime has been outsourced to a third party package (tokio).

- The 6 week release cadence is a bit fast for me, and despite all your talk of standardization, Rust still doesn't have a formal specification [3].

- The 'unsafe' keyword gets thrown around a lot in Rust crates. As a newcomer, my options are to audit every dependency and hope there isn't a memory safety vulnerability, or cross my fingers and hope the packages are of high quality.

[1] https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

[2] https://crates.io/crates/reqwest/0.11.23/dependencies

[3] https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/11/15/spec-visio...