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Comment by Androider | Hacker News Reader

It's usually not enough to be a bit better than what you're trying to displace, you have to be 10X better than the status quo to have any real impact. For example, SVN tried to be a better CVS, while Git came out of left field and destroyed the competition by being 10X better.

In that, Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js. Meteor.js also though that funding could be the answer, but it wasn't. They're both clever, great for demos, but not sufficiently so to overcome the sheer inertia of Node+NPM et al. When something truly 10X better arrives, it will be quite apparent. Just like how React spawned a new generation of frameworks, nothing has unseated it yet because all the competition is React-like and not 10X better.

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This explanation resonates with me.

I first saw Ryan Dahl's talk about his Node.js regrets[0] during the early days of the pandemic. I thought I'd be eager to try Deno when it became more mature, but I still haven't tried it. I guess I'm not convinced that it's 10x better than Node.js.

[0] https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA

>Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js

In substance they are similar in that they both want/ed tighter "vertical integration" of tools ("DX") in an opinionated way, with the money-making plan being convenient paid hosting. "Look how easy and fun it is to make powerful stuff; we hope you give us money to host it for you!" So far the only company that's had success with this pitch is Amazon of all people, by offering a staggering array of partially specialized EC2 instances behind an API.

For whatever reason, it does seem like devs really like their app authoring tools to be independent of their distribution mechanisms. Maybe AWS doesn't trigger this because it doesn't feel like hosting (even though it is). When a whole diverse community seems to act coherently in this way, it's probably a good idea to listen to them. (Alternatively, when a community acts coherently, its ALSO a good idea to try something new.)

Deno is quite good. It may even be 10x node, if only because it avoids npm and has a much more thoughtful module system. It's a (much) better DX, too. Can they make money? Time will tell and, luckily, that's not my problem!

> In substance they are similar in that they both want/ed tighter "vertical integration" of tools ("DX") in an opinionated way, with the money-making plan being convenient paid hosting. "Look how easy and fun it is to make powerful stuff; we hope you give us money to host it for you!" So far the only company that's had success with this pitch is Amazon of all people, by offering a staggering array of partially specialized EC2 instances behind an API.

I think NextJS and Vercel probably fall into this bucket as well.

There is also the "closed loop DX" strat where the tools hosted with your code. For example, Mike Bostocks ObservableHQ, jupyter notebooks hosted for free (at least for now) on Google Drive, codepen, and a bunch more especially for server-side demos. And of course there's no way they will all become profitable companies. In fact I believe there is a "DX metagame" which governs the entire space, because devs can get fatigued by too much choice, and just say "fuck it, I'm coding my thing in notepad and pushing with ftp."

> For example, SVN tried to be a better CVS, while Git came out of left field and destroyed the competition by being 10X better.

I agree with the overall sentiment, but this is a bad example. SVN was pretty successful at replacing CVS, even though it was not 10x better.

Until, of course the new generation came in (git, mercurial...).

Git was developed by Linux's creator and a requirement to take part into Linux development.

xckd is full of examples of much "better" it happens to be in reality.

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