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Comment by seumars | Hacker News Reader

All the recent Node-related features are bound to alienate their core audience but I wonder to what extent.

The solution to this is socially-enforced, like it is for most questions of best practices, code style, etc.

What are the drawbacks of these changes? I haven't been following deno very closely.

IMO the appeal of Deno was an opportunity to rethink the JavaScript ecosystem. The introduction of all these Node features make it far more likely that things stay the same way they currently exist with Node, making it feel pointless to bother with Deno at all in the first place.

Is package.json required?

Not required, but perhaps contagious

This is a valid concern but I think they can mitigate it with social pressure, documentation, and public success stories from users that fully eschew the old system.

Hopefully not everything has to be as contagious as POSIX compatibility was for OS's.

except that if deno fails because its uptake cost makes it hard for engineers to sell to their org, what does it accomplish then? At least if it's getting used heavily people can invest engineering effort into the ecosystem on company time.

Does every project need to strive for maximum adoption? I guess because Deno is a company the answer is yes.

But I think one of Deno’s initial appeals was “A JS/TS runtime for people that don’t want to deal with JavaScript status quo”. Its accomplishment would have been to be bold and try something different, similar to for example Zig.

Almost a year ago with Deno 1.22 type checking for TypeScript was default disabled. (i.E. you must manually request checking on the CLI, editors still do typechecking as before)

At least in my microcosm of Deno-use the package quality degraded since then with more and more packages having subtle type bugs that could have been caught easily by anyone with checks enabled.

Compared to what was before that is to me a drawback, but of course it depends on whether your bigger priority is to reduce friction.

Apparently `deno bundle` has now been deprecated too, because it couldn’t be used for web bundling and because NodeJS support is hard.

So early adopters that possibly wanted to get away from the web and NPM get punished by these ecosystems now.

Hope my 2 cents answer your question.

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