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Comment by jecxjo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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?

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