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Comment by askyourmother | Hacker News Reader

I think in time, we will look back at the mess of "modern js" development, including the true shit-show of npm, in the same way we look back at the horrors of J2EE, XML hell, bean hell, FactoryOfFactoryOfFactoryofEclipsePleaseAutoCompleteThisBeforeRSIsetsIn, and the rest.

The only interesting bit is whether it will be webassembly or something else that actually drags us into a paradigm shift for the web.

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Everything will always be horrible. I promise.

JavaEE is not horrible.

It is rock solid, has a nice and friendly community, tons of resources, several high-quality open source implementations and the Java language itself has 2 or 3 IDEs in the top 10 IDEs list (ok, the last one is my subjective opinion.)

>The only interesting bit is whether it will be webassembly or something else

I'm interested in this as well. The near term plans, though, don't give wasm languages dom access, and limits wasm to statically typed languages. So, it's basically relegated to being an ffi layer for js for quite some time. I don't see that changing the world much.

Shit show? It's a dependency manager. It's no different to any other dependency manager, like RPM or dpkg. It has way more stuff in it's repos than any previous dependency manager, which is good, because programmers don't have to constantly rewrite the wheel. I hope for something like that has the scale of npm on other languages in future.

Npm is awesome. When I want poorly thought out single line functions disguised as modules, with dependency chains a mile long, is it my go-to tool.

After all, why have a simple left-pad function, when I have lots and lots of modules, just to achieve the same result?

A simple left pad function is a module. One is simply a container for the other. It honestly sounds like you haven't used npm.

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