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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

> The bad thing was that it was annoying to find and download new versions of libraries every time they would update.

This goes back to one of the key complaints about front-end culture, though. Exactly how often should this be a problem? Seems to me that actual library code should be stable and updates would be on an infrequent basis.

One general response is "well, this is what happens when you don't have a solid/broad standard library," and that's one of the complaints about JS that kindof sticks for me, but if that were what this was all about, I might expect to see a handful of standard libraries pop up over time and stabilize instead of a fine-grained and deep transience-ridden dependency tree that requires a package manager...

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> I might expect to see a handful of standard libraries pop up over time and stabilize

What makes you think this hasn't happened? jQuery and underscore/lodash are some examples of libraries that have a lot of traction. Why is JS having package management seen as a downside? It's an upside in every other language community, but for some reason we should try to avoid using one in JavaScript?

underscore is a good counterpoint. jQuery is a great library, but I think it's arguably not what people mean when they talk about standard libraries, which has more to do with the question of why in the world there's a leftpad package.

> Why is JS having package management seen as a downside? It's an upside in every other language community

FWIW I'd say that thinking of package management as an unqualified upside in any language or environment is a mistake, though getting deep into that argument is not on my to-do list for the day, as convincing anybody who isn't naturally amenable to it would probably require going over the groundwork involved in groking JWZ's famous quote about regular expressions ("Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.") and some philosophy about automation and the attention economy.

But package management is convenient for sure, and there's any number of situations in which I use it and am happy about it, particularly when I'm installing things where I'm primarily a user rather than a developer. The specific complaint about JS is based on the observation that the dependency tree seems to be fine-grained and transient in what seems like an unusual way to me. In that situation, I suspect the problems that come with any other pm system are likely magnified, including developer dependency on it, which moves from convenience towards necessity.

You're talking about Lodash. But the remaining issue is of locality. If you use a package as a standard library, you still have to send that package to a client for them to use your app. Whereas a 'real' standard library would already exist as part of their interpreter/browser/operating system.

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