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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> i will come back once you JS folks have agreed on a tool set and actually use it for more than 6 months.

It works as a joke too, but the vast majority of JS developers aren't using tools younger than 6 months old. Even current hotness Vue.js was originally released in 2015, and Webpack was initially released in 2012.

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You seem to have forgotten the latest hotness yarn, which is indeed less than 6 months old.

You don't have to use Yarn. And if you do want to, it's a simple drop in replacement that requires almost zero configuration.

Yarn will save you 10x the time you spend configuring it from using it just once. But go ahead, keep using NPM, new stuff is scary.

My point wasn't that there aren't interesting tools younger than 6 months, just that nothing compels JS devs to use them or even pay attention to them until they're as established (in age, use, GitHub stars, whatever) as is comfortable for them.

All the instructions for everyone now uses yarn though, so you are affected, just like everyone was affected with the bower switch, gulp switch, etc.

The churn in tooling is unavoidable even if you use slightly less fashionable frameworks.

The trouble is that yarn is legitimately better than npm. My life is better as a developer because of yarn.

I'm not claiming that all those transitions were for the best, far from it, but the real question for any language community to answer is: "how much churn is acceptable in the pursuit of better?" JS is an ongoing cultural experiment in seeing what happens when you turn that dial to 11.

That's irrelevant in many ways. non-javascript languages deal with this by improving the existing tools.

And realistically speaking, yarn is not a discernable improvement over npm.

The cultural experiment has a huge cost to programmers and it's been an utter disaster. Even PHP has leapfrogged javascript.

What about Webpack 2 or Vue.JS 2 with it's breaking changes?

I'll share my personal experience, which is that the move to Vue.js 2 was fairly straightforward. The project's handy "migration helper" helped a lot. Still, it's not something I jumped on immediately.

I haven't upgraded my projects to Webpack 2 yet. I'm interested but not compelled to, and I'll do it when it makes sense for me.

Does that make JavaScript a bad ecosystem? I have a hard time thinking of thoughtful major releases as a bad thing.

A major release with significant breaking changes is very damaging (Angular 2, Python 3, ...)

The move to Vue.js was straightforward (and I'm not a great software engineer), but I understand that YMMV.

imo Migrating to either one wasn't as hard as Rails 2 -> 3. You'd have a better point if you mentioned migration from Angular 1 -> 2.

I was doing vue.js 10 years ago with knockout, it's the perfect example of unnecessary churn the parent was referring too.

If Knockout has been around for over a decade (v3.4.2 was released a couple weeks ago), isn't it also the perfect examples that churn isn't a given just because JavaScript?

The churn comes from the community, not from any particular library. Only having experience with knockout but not react or angular for instance will halve your job opportunities for instance.

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