What if we had a great standard library in JavaScript?

> Guess what? In the real world, this model quickly leads to a multitude of issues. The most obvious example is that if a package is removed for any reason, chaos quickly spreads... That’s actually not the main problem though.

Not only is that not the main problem, that has nothing to do with the use of small components. The issue with removal of packages is caused by not having an immutable package repository, which is actually pretty easy to fix with a system like IPFS.

> A standard library could easily be added to JavaScript without years of committee infighting, stalled projects and failed approaches (remember the bat-shit craziness of E4X?). ES6 took 6 years to finalize and browsers to this day still don’t fully support it. There are plenty of successful and widely used libraries to draw inspiration (and implementation) for a first round from, like Underscore.js (and it’s predecessor in spirit, Prototype.js).

Since we already have underscore, backbone, express, bluebird, and all these other libraries, why would we want to end the competition by pulling them into the core and having to support them in a backwards-compatible way for years to come? These libraries basically are JavaScript's "standard library"... they just happen to be optional.

The real problem is that these APIs don't come easy, and given that JS didn't bother to even start on this stuff until recently other languages have up to 25 years head start on JS. It doesn't help that the standards guys are just playing around implementing stuff piecemeal, so you end up with Map and Set, and the literally useless WeakSet, rather than just building a solid collections framework, or service workers where as soon as a feature is implemented in all browsers it gets deprecated because something shinier comes along.

Even the stuff that is announced is horribly documented to the extent that most people will never discover it or figure out how to use it. W3Schools hangs around at the top of search results like an unusually stupid cancer, chrome document nothing, and MDN does okay but is weak on tutorial and has some awkward holes.

I think this article ignores that JavaScript's standard library has been growing in pace with new language features. The author mentions underscore as a good place to draw inspiration, but a ton of it's functionality has already been added to the language. forEach, map, reduce, filter, every, some, and others were added in ES5. ES6 brings find, includes, isArray, Object.assign and others. Promises were also added, make a library for them now unnecessary. Many of the current proposals aren't just for syntax additions to language, but to implement more standard library type of stuff (including string padding).