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and by the way, I can't recommend Node either. As far as I can tell, they're eagerly making these same mistakes.

Node is no panacea, but that's not quite true about stable APIs. npm is great about maintaining separately versioned libraries and reducing conflicts.

In your package.json can specify what version of a library to use and npm mostly figures it out for you. For instance, I'm still intentionally using an older version of Express (2.5.9 instead of 3.0.x) and npm hasn't had a problem figuring out deps.

Part of the reason this works is that the npms you install are kept in the local folder, not stored globally as many other package managers do, so some other random app on you box won't trample your delicate library configuration.

If you use ruby with bundler you get same behaviour. Something like bundler should have been built into rubygems in the first place.

sure, but, if you chose to upgrade to Express 3.0.0, would your application still work? or are all the method signatures in Express 3 different from Express 2.5 ?

And (as you note above), is 2.5 still getting critical bug fixes? There's a thin line between stable and stagnant.

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