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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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