Comment by KPGv2
1 day ago
> I genuinely can't understand why you suppose that has to do with the implementation language at all.
Languages that attract novice programmers (JS is an obvious one; PHP was one 20 years ago) have a higher noise to signal ratio than one that attracts intermediate and above programmers.
If you grabbed an average Assembly programmer today, and an average JavaScript programmer today, who do you think is more careful about programming? The one who needs to learn arcane shit to do basic things and then has to compile it in order to test it out, or the one who can open up Chrome's console and console.log("i love boobies")
How many embedded systems programmers suck vs full stack devs? I'm not saying full stack devs are inferior. I'm saying that more inferior coders are attracted to the latter because the barriers to entry are SO much easier to bypass.
Sure, but that kind of incompetence is already filtered out (in the https://www.lesswrong.com/w/screening-off-evidence sense) by the task of creating a package installer.
You would think so, yet here I am sitting with a node_modules full of crud placed there by npm, waiting for the next supply chain attack.
npm isn't the issue there it's the ts\js community and their desire to use a library for everything. in communities that do not consider dependencies to be a risk you will find this showing up in time.
The node supply chain attacks are also not unique to node community. you see them happening on crates.io and many other places. In fact the build time scripts that cause issues on node modules are probably worse off with the flexibility of crate build scripts and that they're going to be harder to work around than in npm.
I don't see how that follows.
uv doesn't exactly stop python package supply chain attacks...
I don't think cargo is much better in that respect. It's what happens when instead of a decent standard library and a few well established frameworks you decide that every single little thing must be a separate project.
That argument is FUD. The people who created the NPM package manager are not the people who wrote your dependencies. Further, supply chain attacks occur for reasons that are entirely outside NPM's control. Fundamentally they're a matter of trust in the ecosystem — in the very idea of installing the packages in the first place.
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