I’m a bit torn on this. I have most of my experience in the .NET ecosystem, where dependencies are a lot more manageable. However, if something breaks, you’re screwed a lot harder, because it’s not so easy to replace a large library, and there are very likely fewer well-maintained alternatives than there would be on NPM.
In total, I find it hard to deny how productive the NPM ecosystem can be, despite my philosophical objections to the way the community is run. Am I crazy here?
You aren't alone in this. The Node/NPM/JS scene is churning out code and innovations like there's no tomorrow, that's something to admire.
What I feel they are missing is a community process to consolidate things. You don't need three generations of ten incompatible solutions for a given problem - after some iterations, things should consolidate into one or two more or less standardized libs that don't break existing code at every damn point release.
> You aren't alone in this. The Node/NPM/JS scene is churning out code and innovations like there's no tomorrow, that's something to admire.
I don't find churning out code admirable, and I also don't think I've seen any true innovation come out of the NPM scene (bar innovation in the browser/JS space itself, which I think isn't a good measure as it's mostly just working around limitations that shouldn't be there in the first place).
In total, I find it hard to deny how productive the NPM ecosystem can be, despite my philosophical objections to the way the community is run. Am I crazy here?