Comment by ivanjermakov

9 hours ago

Respect for embracing existing tech instead of rewriting a worse version of it. Wonder where we would be today if all alternative-building effort went to Node instead (with proper leadership).

13 comments

ivanjermakov

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johnfn  8 hours ago

You might remember the io.js fork of Node.js back in 2014. Node was stagnating, a bunch of people forked it into io.js, which eventually got merged back into Node and got it back on track. Or, going further back, CoffeeScript, a "fork" of JS that had its best ideas adopted back into ES5.

A small scrappy team can prove out a good idea because failure is not a catastrophic risk to them. In short, forks are part of a healthy ecosystem.

  • llbbdd  2 hours ago

    I had a lot of very good times with CoffeeScript but I'll never forgive it for having implicit returns. So many subtle event-bubbling bugs caused by that.

  • hootz  7 hours ago

    It is still happening, a lot of things are still being adopted by Node after being available on other runtimes. They aren't forks, but they still provide pressure towards progress.

hungryhobbit  8 hours ago

Fundamentally you can't fix a lot of things with this approach.

Simple example: Node is the only serious OSS software I know of that has no way to document its config (in the config file itself). It's moronic! The Node people just adopted JSON without a thought, and then refused to consider any alternatives (even "JSON with comments").

When an organization digs into bad decisions, the only way to fix them is to start something new. The entire JS ecosystem will never have documentation on its config as long as everyone keeps building on top of Node.

(And there are many other issues like this in the Node ecosystem; the utter absurdity of not being able to document config is just my personal pet peeve.)

  • johnfn  8 hours ago

    > Simple example: Node is the only serious OSS software I know of that has no way to document its config (in the config file itself). It's moronic! The Node people just adopted JSON without a thought, and then refused to consider any alternatives (even "JSON with comments").

    Tangential but this also drives me absolutely nuts. If I have to see `"//": "some comment"` one more time I'm gonna lose it.

  • jdxcode  3 hours ago

    I agree that it sucks not being able to have comments in package.json, but I think it's the right call to not adopt something like jsonc. It would break so much tooling at this point I don't think it would be worth it.

  • colinmcd  6 hours ago

    EDIT: Sorry, I understand you're talking about package.json. Would be fun to try to get the Node & package mgmt teams aligned to add support for comments in the package.json. Bun tried and failed to do this (requires ecosystem coordination).

    Nub could absolutely support a config file and use it to set NODE_OPTIONS or flags in the node child process. There's no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater due to DX concerns like this. That's a key part of the concept Nub is trying to prove. (To be clear I'm quite content to conform to Node's no-config-file policy at the moment.)

  • matt_kantor  5 hours ago

    > Simple example: [package.json is JSON]

    Why can't you fix this while embracing existing tech? I can imagine monkeypatching Node & NPM to add support for JSONC or JSON5 or whatever in the same way that Nub adds various features via monkeypatching. Is there some architectural reason that can't work?

    You'd need `npm publish` to compile it down to plain JSON when publishing, but that seems like an okay compromise.

  • afavour  3 hours ago

    Isn't this a problem contained to npm more than Node itself?

    I'm imagining pnpm or others being able to adopt a package.json file that allows comments, then, when actually publishing, ensuring the published package.json is regular JSON.