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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, things seem to be settling down in the JS community. In the past, every time a library lacked a particular feature, the community suddenly abandoned it. At the same time, every new version release had all sorts of horrible breaking changes, that made upgrading a very scary task.

Now, the JS community seems to be thinking more about stability and backwards compatibility. That's very welcome, at least from the perspective of this grumpy server-side developer.

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I'm still skeptical. Webpack is one of the saner ones. Many JS libraries are still doing break-everything major version releases- Babel and Angular come to mind.

That's what a major version is supposed to signify though, isn't it? Most JS/NPM-based projects use semantic versioning, so a major version update means breaking/backwards-incompatible.

Even if it's communicated correctly, it's still a hassle.

Are you complaining that things get updated? You don't have to use the absolute latest versions of everything, you can still use older versions if you want.

Caring about upgrade paths is super important to the longevity of a project. See: Python 3 vs Ruby 2 adoption.

Taking the mentality that "I can break everything and just bump the major number" will lead to a project that either 1) is no longer is used by many people or 2) is a maintenance hell because people are staying on old versions and asking for bug fixes and improvements.

yeah, we're very much building on top now. There's still a few competing options for everything (and that's a good thing! You need SOME competition to ensure nothing stagnates), but we're mostly done redoing everything from scratch.

There's still a little churn in the framework and state management world, but the existing options are more than good enough for years to come and nothing drastically different is popping up into the spotlight anymore.

>> Interestingly, things seem to be settling down in the JS community.

As a front-end dev, to me it seems to be zipping along at the same, old faster-than-it-should pace it has for the past few years. Depends on perspective I guess.

> Now, the JS community seems to be thinking more about stability and backwards compatibility. That's very welcome, at least from the perspective of this grumpy server-side developer.

That's exactly why the blog post suggests using yarn instead of npm, isn't it?

Have you used yarn? Do you know what it is? It's a fully backwards compatible client built on the npm packaging system, using npm's repository, and built in collaboration with the npm team.

Its also awesome, I switched when it was on HN a while back and its been amazing. I seldom get excited about JS tools but yarn is an exception.

Have you tried PNPM or IED?

It's not quite ready for production yet. There are still some bugs with dev dependencies and private repos that need to be addressed before we can use it.

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