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Comment by moviedo | Hacker News Reader

Batteries included backend frameworks exists in the JS ecosystem, just look at https://adonisjs.com/ . The problem is that the nodejs ecosystem started off with micro-frameworks as the antithesis to what they believed were “overbearing” frameworks, like rails and Django, at the time. I remember express’s selling point was to build quick and dirty.

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Even from the POV of micro-frameworks, the JS ecosystem sucks. There's just so many competing half-baked libraries doing the same thing slightly differently and incompatible ways.

Compare this to the Ruby ecosystem, where every framework (including Rails) uses Rack, which means that all the frameworks compose together, if that's how you'd like to modularize your monolith. Or the other ecosystem known for its preference for libraries over frameworks, Go, where everything is standardized around http.Handler, so whatever you pick is basically guaranteed to compose.

And it's not just the lack of good overall frameworks, it's the general lack of good defaults for libraries in Node-land. Among the most popular ORMs/query builders over the years there are some surprising omissions, with Knex not supporting connection pinning or Prism not doing database joins by default for a long time.

It's because JavaScript has no culture

Everyone who works with the web is forced to use it, each coming in with their own opinions of how things should be done.. thus we have the fragmentation

Ruby grew in a large part due to Rails, so everyone that's in—and stayed in—that community has been self selected to share similar ideas of how to build web apps

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