What's this "standard" package anyway? Looks like it's packing eslint with an .estlintrc and... that's it?
- In the beginning was the jQuery style guidelines, which started for jQuery but were eventually for general JS https://contribute.jquery.org/style-guide/js/
- Then there was idiomatic.js, from a massive bunch of JS community leaders https://github.com/rwaldron/idiomatic.js/, evolving some of the principles of jQuery style guidelines.
- Then AirBnB made their own style guides because they didn't realise the jQuery guidelines or Idiomatic existed
- Feross and some other people made 'Standard' JS, ignoring the previous 3 standards, and said it's standard because, well: https://github.com/standard/standard#but-this-isnt-a-real-we... (see 'tape' and how it's 'the only test framework which supports TAP' because the tape author invented TAP). https://standardjs.com/
- Currently most JS devs who have been around a while use Prettier instead of eslint because it formats the code rather than just complaining (recent versions of Standard apparently do this too, but that came later) https://prettier.io/
Feross himself is awesome. The name 'standardJS' was a poor choice.
What? The tape package on npm? As far as I know, that was made by substack (James Halliday), whereas TAP dates back to 1987 with Perl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Anything_Protocol says “the Test::Harness module was written by Tim Bunce and Andreas König”).
Sure, Standard on the face of it seems simple technologically, and compared to many other things it is. But it's value lies in completely removing long winded and often unnecessary conversations within teams about code style.
Standard represents a standard style of writing JS that has gained widespread support (similar to Airbnb's linter config). It's value is that a team can adopt broadly sane conventions then never think about it again - which leaves those dev cycles for shipping features. Without widespread use, Standard would be just another linter config - but large parts of the JS ecosystem (regardless of what people think of JS) have adopted it and as a result it has saved the world a million conversations that "didn't need to happen".
If you care enough about style to not pick their choices, you're free not to use it. But for a lot of us we just want a broadly accepted opinion so we can focus on features.
And as it turns out, maintaining a style guide for how to write JS for the masses takes quite a lot of work. Not writing code necessarily, but considering and replying to all the feedback on that style.
Not for or against the funding project - but within the JS ecosystem Standard has meant many hundreds of hours that might have been spent biked shedding, have been spent shipping features.
Standard has been genuinely useful to myself and pretty much every other JS developer I know. And whilst I'm in no position to speak to weather I'm junior or not I know a lot of the most experienced programmers in the JS ecosystem reach for Standard so they can focus on more important matters.
It's not JS that has such opinions enshrined in law, Python for example has pep8.
So Feross tried to solve this by, yes, making an eslint config and a thin wrapper around it to run it, then giving it a really pretentious name in the hope it would become The Coding Style for JS. It didn't work. Airbnb has always had a significantly more popular eslint config package, and more recently the Prettier tool has solved the problem Standardjs was trying to solve much better (and become much more popular).
And the issue with trying to do what Standardjs is trying to do is that if you're not the most popular solution, you're part of the problem. :)