Comment by leptons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leptons | Hacker News Reader

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>The lack of comments in package.json is one of the biggest complaints of this format, and it's certainly not just me

Well then you and plenty of other people have some wrong ideas about package.json. That isn't surprising.

package.json gets rewritten for all kinds of things, which is not really compatible with adding comments wherever you want. Adding "why this dependency is here" comments may seem like a good idea to add to package.json, but you're kind of missing the point. If you need that level of documentation, trying to shoehorn it into package.json is just the wrong place for it. Soon enough your package.json looks like a graffiti wall.

>To be blunt, then, I can't believe you've ever written any code in a business (i.e. with multiple developers) in the Node/NPM ecosystem.

Then you'll be astonished that I have been working with nodejs for about 14 years professionally. Sure I have wanted to put comments into package.json, but I was naive and now I'm fine not doing that. I haven't wanted to in many years. I document things in other ways and it has served us all very well. YMMV.

> if you need that level of documentation, trying to shoehorn it into package.json is just the wrong place for it. Soon enough your package.json looks like a graffiti wall.

So the right place is to make a graffiti out of another place, instead of in the place where people actually declare the dependencies?

I find it bizarre when people believe in one true way of doing things. I mean, you can declare your dependencies how you like, but if others do it differently, then they're clueless?

You're clueless if you think adding comments to package.json - a file that regularly gets rewritten - is anything but an exercise in futility. Any time you run "npm install [whatever]" you are rewriting package.json. How exactly do you expect to maintain your random comments in this case? You expect nodejs to understand how comments are being written in package.json and not mess that up? You don't seem to understand how npm or package.json works.

This is the silliest of circular logic. Of course you can't add comments to package.json, so tools can do whatever they want to the file. The fact that tools can rewrite parts of it doesn't mean they should just be able to do whatever they want. Literally every other single other config file format supports comments, and I have never seen a problem with tooling on those files due to the presence of comments.

> but I was naive and now I'm fine not doing that

Either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

Nice try, but no.

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