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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

One factor is that node's philosophy is to have a very limited standard library and rely on community software for a ton of stuff.

That means that not only the average project has a ton of dependencies, but also any given dependency will in turn have a ton of dependencies as well. there’s multiplicative effects in play.

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This is my take as well. I've never come accross a JS project where the built-in datastructures were exclusively used.

One package for lists, one for sorting, and down the rabbit hole you go.

I think this is mostly historical baggage unfortunately. Every codebase I've ever worked in there was a huge push to only use native ES6 functionality, like Sets, Maps, all the Iterable methods etc., but there was still a large chunk of files that were written before these were standardized and widely used, so you get mixes of Lodash and a bunch of other cursed shit.

Refactoring these also isn't always trivial either, so it's a long journey to fully get rid of something like Lodash from an old project

This has improved recently. Packages like lodash were once popular but you can do most stuff with the standard library now. I think the only glaring exception is the lack of a deep equality function.

This is the main reason. Pythons ecosystem also has silly trends and package churn, and plenty of untrained developers. It’s the lack of a proper standard library. As bad a language as it may be, Java shows how to get this right.

> As bad a language as it may be, Java shows how to get this right.

To be fair Java has improved a lot over the last few years. I really have the feeling that Java is getting better, while C++ is getting worse.

Goddamnit: meant to write “node’s” not “pythons”. Human is hallucinating.

What? Python's standard library seems far more extensive than Java's.

A strange typo: should have written “node”. Kinda changed the intent of my comment. Oops.

Yeah if anything I'm used to the opposite complaint about python that there's too much included in the stdlib.

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