Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
1–10 of 216 posts
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#2npm ci is your friend.
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#3> During the past 5–6 years of my JavaScript experience, every time I wanted to go back to any of my projects—from tiny to big, server-side or front-end—there was always a challenge, a problem to tackle or an obstacle to overcome before I can update or sometimes even just run my program.
why i moved mostly from writing node cmd tools to using bash. don't need to go on a bunch of side missions every time i run npm install
not enough pragmatism in the JS community (people). more about hot new thing as opposed to boring long term stability. maybe because of web/chrome as a constantly moving platform, and Apple/Jobs app-ification of everything, relative young age of JS community.
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#4I experienced the same issues and to me the main culprit appears to be the dumpster fire that is the ongoing transition to ES2015 modules.
Also Node v18, while full of new, important features(like the built-in test runner) feels... kinda unstable? I had to downgrade to v16 because I had segfaults. Also had to make it use jemalloc due to memory leak issues when it used the default allocator.
I went into this platform specifically not to deal with such problems.
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#5npm ci is your friend.
It's partly a solution, but doesn't help when the 'enviroment' (OS, Node, compiler toolchains used in dependencies) has moved on and is no longer compatible with the old version-pinned npm packages, the same problem also exists in other programming ecosystems (just maybe not as extremely - but I have the same bad experience each time I want to write a blog post, because Jekyll usually breaks after a macOS update).
It's not Javascript or Node.js or NPM which is the problem though, but the 'culture' of offloading every little detail into its own dependency, nothing in the Javascript ecosystem technically requires this approach.
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#6npm ci is your friend.
Sure, but this friend is also changing. Suddenly now it verifies peer dependencies. Oops.
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#7We are probably at the tipping point where the JS engine should now be part of the kernel and run in ring 0.
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#8I agree with you. Now, thanks to JS and web browsers, anybody has access to a wide eco-system via a small interface. This is mine : http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ with which I can play and explore lots of funny algorithms.
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#9We are probably at the tipping point where the JS engine should now be part of the kernel and run in ring 0.
If that kernel is linux kernel, then linux kernel should userspace app in js kernel.
Re: Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them
#10In the early 2010s, the industry was dominated by mature and stable ecosystems, such as Python/Django and Rails. Then Node came about, and when it was still extremely immature, it got a ton of attention as an army of front-end devs started to flock to it. "We are backend engineers now too!".
Doesn't work that way. Node has been basically re-learning all the lessons learned a long time ago, and many lessons it didn't learn at all. The fact that the FAANG alumni then joined the orgy and reminded us that we are all lame because we really need to be doing distributed systems for everything (for the young ones - microservices), did not make things simpler.
Leave a JS project unattended for a few weeks and I go back to it with a sense of dread. What horrors await me?
In contrast, I dusted off an old Flask project from 8 years ago, upgraded the dependency manager, the major Python version, 2-3 hours and off I go.