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Personally I would like it and the ecosystem to just cease to exist overnight. Nothing on earth has caused so much pain, misery, suffering and agony, apart from possibly PHP.

Our devops guys scream from the seething pain whenever the have to debug some pile of shit that decides it won't build unless all the runes are aligned precisely and all the RAM in the universe is available on the build runners. And pushing this to the developers results in importing more packages thus adding to the burning tyre fire.

And after several hours of builds and 9000 layers of packages you wake up one morning and in that 50 meg chunk of javascript that is excreted from the process, someone managed to inject a "Slava Ukraini!" banner into your web app.




I'm sorry, but there is no chance that the automake/autoconf suite of tools has caused less pain than `npm install`.


We have almost buried those.


I mean... just don't install everything then?

Over-reliance on third party dependencies is a choice. One could argue that it's unreasonable not to do it if you want to stay competitive but good luck changing human nature then. If there are shortcuts, they will be taken.


While this is true, when the shipped standard library by NodeJS lacks so many VERY BASIC features that every other language has, OF COURSE developers choosing/being instructed to use JS so that frontend and backend languages are synced are going to reach for packages to solve whatever functionality should already exist in code like: "Jim".leftPad(4)


"Jim".padStart(4) has existed in JS (and Node) for 6 years now.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...




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