Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

This made me chuckle.

As for the "how to fix" I suspect the biggest step forward would be creating a decent standard library.

That would definitely fix the "my small React CRUD SPA relies on 10k package maintainers" issue, but would still leave other issues open.

There's actually an active proposal for a standard library, but it is met with a lot of contempt from the JS community [0]

[0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library...

> "A lot of effort has been put by individuals to promote new ideas. Many of those innovators get nothing out of their effort but the fame of their library. The TC39 would gain the power to render an existing effort mute and thereby ruining a life's work. What do you intend to do to prevent private agendas resulting into half-baked and/or derivative solutions that might do more harm to the ecosystem than good?"

I don't want to swear on HN, so I'll just say .. wow. So there are elements of the community who want to keep the deficiencies there so they can get micro-fame for filling them? People want to feel important by maintaining left-pad?

(also I think they meant moot rather than mute, but hey; also, this is software, we don't really respect idea precedence and any work may be rendered moot by the work of others at almost any time as technology shifts.)

There are better things to be wow'd over than a random encounter with an online idiot. It's the most used language in the world, there are plenty of idiots to be found.

Except you're not really solving the right problem.

The problem is not that the standard library is bad (It could be shite, it could be gold, it doesn't really matter). The problem is that regardless of what's in your "standard" library, you will have a VERY long tail of users interacting with your code in a user agent that just doesn't support it. Period.

So I think you can rephrase this whole conversation as not "make a better standard library!" but instead as "how do we bootstrap a better standard library into user agents that haven't been updated in 10 years?"

In which case suddenly NPM/Babel/Webpack start to make a lot of sense.

Its a three step problem

1) I don't know how to do x, lets google it, oh I have to use this _in vogue_ module.

2) oh this module seems to do what I want. _ship_

3) ~two months later~ oh bugger, that has a vulnerability, its not supported any more/API has wildly changed/new owner

Reply on news.ycombinator.com