While I mainly agree with the author's substantive point, though I find some of the ways it's presented in this post not entirely convincing or fair, I am interested that someone else has identified this:
> I have talked a lot about the costs of libraries, and I do hope people are more cautious about them. But there’s one factor I left out from my previous discussion. I think there’s one more reason why people use libraries: fear.
> Programmers are afraid of causing bugs. Afraid of making mistakes. Afraid of missing edge cases. Afraid that they won’t be able to understand how things work. In their fear they fall back on libraries. “Thank goodness someone else has solved the problem; surely I never would have been able to.”
I think this is true, but why does the JS ecosystem seem to have "more fear" than for example the Python ecosystem?
I wrote about this a while ago. I think that actually JS does (or did) cause more fear in its developers than other programming languages. I described it as paranoia, a more insidious uncertainty.
Quoting myself[1]:
> There are probably many contributing factors that have shaped NPM into what it is today. However, I assert that the underlying reason for the bizarre profusion of tiny, absurd-seeming one-liner packages on NPM is paranoia, caused by a unique combination of factors.
> Three factors have caused a widespread cultural paranoia among JavaScript developers. This has been inculcated over years. These factors are: JavaScript's weak dynamic type system; the diversity of runtimes JavaScript targets; and the physics of deploying software on the web.
...
> Over the years there has been rapid evolution in both frontend frameworks and backend JavaScript, high turnover in bundlers and best-practises. This has metastasized into a culture of uncertainty, an air of paranoia, and an extreme profusion of small packages. Reinventing the wheel can sometimes be good - but would you really bother doing it if you had to learn all the arcane bullshit of browser evolution, IE8 compatibility, implementation bugs, etc. ad infinitum?
> And it's not just that you don't understand how things work now, or how they used to work - but that they'll change in the future!
I think the culture of JS has been reinforced over time, and the result is a novel form of paranoia. npm makes package-sharing easy, developers share trivial packages, people use trivial packages, people rationalize trivial packages, people teach beginners never to write code, beginners think they can never write code, beginners grow up and here we are.
Certainly the language is quirky, but it really doesn't change that much. Frameworks have come and gone but JavaScript itself is still the same. is-number would have looked much the same 15 years ago, if anyone was crazy enough to actually distribute it.
I agree, I think. The language issues, and NPM technical issues, are small contributing factors. I'd argue the culture was more a result of the physics of deploying code over the internet to varied and unreliable browsers than it was to do with anything NPM did.
> “Thank goodness someone else has solved the problem; surely I never would have been able to.”
No, it's much more mundane: "Thank goodness someone else has solved the problem because I surely as hell don't want to solve it myself because I don't have either time or brain power/will/motivation for that". What is a number is JS? I don't even want to start thinking about it, just give me an isNumber() function. Why is it not in the standard libary in the first place?
My instinct would have been that this applies to Python! I'm only working from an anecdotal dataset of 1, a friend who works in insurance and is becoming necessarily more and more familiar with Python for data processing.
> I have talked a lot about the costs of libraries, and I do hope people are more cautious about them. But there’s one factor I left out from my previous discussion. I think there’s one more reason why people use libraries: fear.
> Programmers are afraid of causing bugs. Afraid of making mistakes. Afraid of missing edge cases. Afraid that they won’t be able to understand how things work. In their fear they fall back on libraries. “Thank goodness someone else has solved the problem; surely I never would have been able to.”
I think this is true, but why does the JS ecosystem seem to have "more fear" than for example the Python ecosystem?
I wrote about this a while ago. I think that actually JS does (or did) cause more fear in its developers than other programming languages. I described it as paranoia, a more insidious uncertainty.
Quoting myself[1]:
> There are probably many contributing factors that have shaped NPM into what it is today. However, I assert that the underlying reason for the bizarre profusion of tiny, absurd-seeming one-liner packages on NPM is paranoia, caused by a unique combination of factors.
> Three factors have caused a widespread cultural paranoia among JavaScript developers. This has been inculcated over years. These factors are: JavaScript's weak dynamic type system; the diversity of runtimes JavaScript targets; and the physics of deploying software on the web.
...
> Over the years there has been rapid evolution in both frontend frameworks and backend JavaScript, high turnover in bundlers and best-practises. This has metastasized into a culture of uncertainty, an air of paranoia, and an extreme profusion of small packages. Reinventing the wheel can sometimes be good - but would you really bother doing it if you had to learn all the arcane bullshit of browser evolution, IE8 compatibility, implementation bugs, etc. ad infinitum?
> And it's not just that you don't understand how things work now, or how they used to work - but that they'll change in the future!
[1] https://listed.to/@crabmusket/14061/javascript-s-ecosystem-i...