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Comment by chrysoprace | Hacker News Reader

I think that in 2026 Node is a boring technology, but with the fast-moving ecosystem around it if you opt into npm (the registry, not the package manager) it makes it not boring.

The things you layer on top of Node via npm could count as "not-boring" in this instance, especially with the number of supply-chain attacks each month.

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Yeah, compared to most other languages there's a lot of moving parts and activity in the space still - npm vs pnpm vs yarn, node vs bun vs deno, eslint / prettier vs biome vs oxlint, and that's before even writing a single line of code.

Boring in comparison would be Go where a lot of things are standardized. You still get some non-boring in choosing what libraries to use (if applicable) but generally it's a very dull language/ecosystem.

I think the main problem is just that we don't have a standard library across the browser and server. We have to reinvent everything across both domains because we don't have good building blocks unlike Go which, despite my issues with some the standard library, at least has one.

I'm disappointed that we've fragmented across Node/Deno/Bun, although I was briefly hopeful for Deno since they tried to standardise around ESM and provide a strong standard library. Of course this still had to be bundled for the browser, which has its own issues.

Surprisingly I'd still consider this blog post relatively accurate on what it calls boring vs. non-boring.

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