http://blog.npmjs.org/post/168978377570/new-package-moniker-...
Other than that, their reaction to similar incidents was to wait for somebdoy on twitter to notify them, ban the responsible users, and hope that it won't happen again. It's still extremely exploitable and there are surely many other novel ways of installing malware using the repository that we haven't even heard of yet. The NPM security team is slow to act and sadly doesn't think ahead. They're responsible for one of the largest software ecosystems in the world, they should step up their game.
I suppose, but I think it's the javascript "nature" ( dynamic typing along with the scripting style of wanting to be a "swiss knife" to solve all problems ). Javascript, like perl and even C, gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself. And like perl and C, javascript initially seems simple and easy and it deceives you into thinking novices know what they are doing.
> and an influx of low skill developers with no diploma.
That's true of all languages though. Plenty of incompetent developers at all levels and all languages. I don't think it's a javascript issue.
While that's potentially true, I do suspect that there's a lot fewer, say, Haskell, Clojure, or Elixir developers than there are for some other languages. Not that they don't exist, but it seems unlikely that you'd cross paths with them.
But I believe there's a difference in the ratio, too, due to the way Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, etc. programmers learn these languages. Basically, they learn the languages not because someone wants them to (eg. Java, C#, etc.) and not because they have to just to be able to do something they want to do (eg. JavaScript, SQL, etc.). Instead, people learn such languages because they themselves want to, which makes them more probable to delve deeper, learn more and acquire more important skills.
Well, that's a conjecture I can't prove and I may be completely wrong on this, it's just what my anecdotal experience suggests.
I think it somewhat comes back to the "Python Paradox": http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Another part of it is that someone who's incompetent in, e.g. JavaScript, is likely to not make it very far trying to do Clojure. And, again some conjecture, I'd bet that someone who is great at Clojure would write very nice JS.
When I was learning Python back in, 2006 or so, I remember someone stating "You can write Java in any language". This was referring to people who wrote Python code with these huge class hierarchies that inherited from stuff all over the place, when a "Pythonic" solution would have just involved a couple of functions.