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Comment by mrdoops | Hacker News Reader

The way I see it, our over-dependency (sorry for overloading the phrase) on Javascript as the de-facto web language has the pendulum far in one direction. How much longer can we keep this up? What's the maximum capacity of a developer ecosystem before dependency-hell and framework churn reaches critical mass? This is still a complicated information system - how far can it scale? What's the breaking point?

There's so much amateur work and muddied merit-sense-making of what's good software, who to listen to, and how to move forward - my feeling is that pendulum is just about at peak.

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For me this sounds like FUD.

Sure, you can install a bunch of deps for every small problem, but you don't have to.

If you just take a bit time to think, you can roll your own solution for 90% of the deps, which are tiny packages anyway.

But what of the newbie developer? Is he/she going to just roll their own dependencies and do so in a way that's tenable? Green developers make up most of the category.

I guess I was trying to approach a few concerns beyond just dependencies: learning curve, conventions/standards, framework volatility, and merit assess-ability of ideas.

The more people involved (popularity), the greater the difficulty to parse the merit of an idea without pre-existing competence. How easy is it for a new developer to find a cogent way of doing things in Javascript land compared to a smaller more specific ecosystem? In the smaller ecosystem the experts are easier to determine due to a smaller population, whereas in Javascript-land there's so many people, opinions, articles, and conventional disparities; a much more challenging exercise.

In PHP people would (often badly) reinvent the wheel on every project.

In JS people would install packages for every small problem they have.

Neither is good.

I always check if I can write it myself in reasonable time, if not, I install a package for it.

I'd install React, but I'd write the navigation myself.

I'd install a video-player, but I'd write a SVG animation myself.

etc.

This sounds like a problem pretty unique to Javascript, honestly.

I think if you saw a professional C++/C#/F#/LISP*/Clojure dev etc pulling in a dependency to do IsOdd you'd rightly laugh at them... Yet in JS, that just seems like an acceptable thing to do.

I don't understand why the standard is so low. Is it because of all these learn Javascript / Web development in 12 weeks bootcamps?

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