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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what it is about the Node.js ecosystem which leads to the dysfunction, but there's definitely dysfunction, and it's definitely endemic.

Compiling our front end assets takes longer and more CPU than our entire back end with many multiples the amount of source code.

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I think it's that JS has no standard library, so dependency graphs are an endless fan-out instead of fanning back in after a while. That's how you end up with 900 dependencies after importing a single Node module, because every author of every upstream lib chose a different way of doing the same thing.

To add to this the Node ecosystem seems somehow to encourage outsourcing extremely simple pieces of functionality (leftpad anyone?) so you end up including a bunch of crap that you don't really need, all because someone didn't feel like using 10 lines to reimplement something simple.

Javascript has a standard library... intended for the language's actual use case, which is lightweight scripting and DOM manipulation within the browser. It's not a deficit of the language that some startup decided to pretend JS was the new C++ and that an insane and byzantine ecosystem developed around the attempt to force Javascript to be something it was never intended to be, and make it seem more "enterprise."

Endless dependency graphs and single-function modules and left-pads weren't a problem back in the days of JQuery and sane libraries. None of this madness is necessary. No, not even for front-end frameworks. It's unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.

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