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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

Is the package management story significantly worse for js/node than other languages or is it just a meme? If it actually does have more issues, why? Are the npm maintainers less rigorous than, maven central (for example)?

Java is lucky enough to have a lot of very solid Apache libraries built with enterprise money. Is the culture different for js and npm?

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1) Crap standard library and core language, with lots of accidental complexity. These problems are fixed or (more often) swept under the rug many times over by library authors over the course of years, then eventually the core language/lib provides its own attempt at a fix, but by then there are a ton of implementations out in the wild and it'll takes years for a typical mid-size projects dependency tree to shake out all the "deprecated" libraries of any given feature like this, if it ever does. That so many libraries have to pull in other libs for really basic stuff bloats your node_modules dir in a hurry.

2) Platform incompatibility plus no-one actually writes real Javascript that can run directly on any platform anymore anyway, so there are polyfills for yet-to-be-implemented language features and compatibility overlays galore.

3) And yes a lot of it's just the fault of Javascript "culture".

Most js build systems don't do dead code removal. This ends up encouraging many small packages instead of bundling functionality into larger packages.

For example, there is a lodash package, but people don't want to include the whole thing, so now there is one package for each function:

https://www.npmjs.com/~jdalton

As far as I know this aspect is unique to nodejs/npm.

Java/.NET/C++/etc. people don’t have the urge to publish every other line of code they deem “useful”. They also don’t have the urge to import said one-liners when writing a helper method in 15 seconds is perfectly adequate.

> Java/.NET/C++/etc. people don’t have the urge to publish every other line of code they deem “useful”.

I do for my code sometimes, except I make GitHub Gists out of them instead of putting them on NPM.

java and .net also have a large, rich and dependable set of functionalities in their core libs

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