[Onavo]

No, I strongly disagree. Npm may have some weird ergonomics and defaults, but as a dependency manager it is first class. Before npm, almost all dependency managers suffered from the diamond dependency problem. Npm pioneered allowing multiple versions of packages to be simultaneously installed without having to chase down conflicting dependencies as long as the package involved is not a major framework (i.e. peer dependency). For example you can’t (or at least strongly discouraged to) have react v15 and react v20 in the same project, but you can have leftpad v1 and leftpad v3 in the same project. You cannot do this in most other languages like Ruby Python Dart C++ etc. (Java has a similar but half baked concept called shading which requires a separate plugin) Go and Rust followed what npm pioneered, allowing multiple conflicting dependencies too, saving countless hours of developer time. Rust goes as far as supporting linking against code from different language versions. Without npm, Cargo would be doing NP class dependency searches and Rust developers would be wasting forking old upstream repos to bring them up to date. Not everybody has the engineering resources of google to build everything in house and keep every single dependency in sync through a massive monorepo and test suite.

In the npm-style dependency managers, generally speaking, you don’t really get dependency conflicts unless it’s a large overarching peer dependency or something like global singleton e.g. a GPU driver. Regardless of your thoughts on npm or having a massive number of tiny dependencies, you can’t deny npm dragged the dependency management field into the 21st century and forced it to scale.

[ryanbrunner]

Allowing multiple versions of a library to run simultaneously is a design decision - there are definitely shortfalls to allowing this (increased code size, a relative nightmare to audit, increased tendency towards downstream dependencies opening vulnerability potential). Culturally with bundler it tends not to be an issue since the inability to run multiple versions of packages tends to reduce the number of secondary dependencies to only pretty core libraries, and encourages permissive version requirements for gems.

[weaksauce]

> You cannot do this in most other languages like Ruby Python Dart C++ etc.

for good reason. I strongly disagree that what you say is a good thing. you are describing a failure of the javascript ecosystem as a whole where pulling in a package for some trivial(leftpad) task is seen as a good thing and that having incompatible versions of them being able to be installed at the same time is a good thing instead of an indictment on the system. I stand by my statement that they have made the wrong decision at ever step.