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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

It’s because the average dev has less than 5 years of experience according to the StackOverlow survey, and web is the fastest growing field inside software engineering.

A large majority of people you’re chiding for not learning from others, don’t even realize those other things exist.

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But it's not even independent green developers, it's everyone. Chai, mocha, jasmine, jest, should, expect, lab...omg do we really need another unit testing library? Sure they are all slightly different but there is no reason they all couldn't be condensed down to one or two libraries. Shall we list all the reactive UI frameworks? Or routing frameworks? Everyone is at fault here.

Chai is not a testing framework, it's an assertion library compatible with all the other main testing frameworks you mentioned. Yes, we do need experimentation and innovation in testing frameworks. Jest was a real innovation to the space and is particularly awesome for React testing with it's snapshots feature. This kind of argument never gets made with anything else. "Why can't we all just stick to the Model T. It's perfect."

The Model T is a product, but we are talking about tooling, in that context the same spanner that can fix the Model T can fix the latest Tesla.

The car industry probably wouldn't be as big, if you had to learn a new tool for every new car.

I am all for experimentation and creating something new. But so many of these projects out there are not forks of current projects, they are complete rewrites. Is this because the new project is vastly different? Nope! That is the issue, they aren't extremely different.

The reason this is a problem is because web tech is constantly changing, to the point that so many of these projects end up in the scrap heap far faster than other tech. It causes problems with long term service due to compatibility issues with ever changing dependencies.

I have a feeling that JavaScript, and some other areas of open source, have a popularity contest problem - people building projects not because they're needed or useful, but for that brief moment of Internet fame.

It gets worse when instead of your CV, you get hired by startups based on your Internet fame, or wasting your private life building Github (sorry Gitlab) portfolio.

I have the same feeling about this. Github "collect the most stars" effect?

Half of those are assertions libraries, not unit testing libraries. What are you comparing this list to? What is the appropriate number of unit testing libraries a language should have? Do you scale that number for community size?

Ignorance is curable, but requires the cooperation and desire of those who lack to achieve the cure. From my vantage the world of software development seems filled with mediocre individuals who all think of themselves as the Jon Galt of software.

On average most people are average, yes. Most above average people are average in most situations, even.

And sometimes it’s just resume building or intellectual curiosity itching.

Or people just enjoy building something that scratches an itch for them?

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