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In 2010 it made it very easy to share libraries which helped Node grow in popularity. I don’t believe it was possible to do anything like this in Rhino without Java packages but I could be wrong. Certainly it wasn’t as easy as with npm.

Maybe it didn’t have package signing, lock files, or deduping, but clearly it was popular in spite of those faults.

There was Narwhal, which was on Rhino and had a package manager (CommonJS as well.) But it got overtaken by Node pretty quickly.

These days it’s cool to mock npm, but it was package management done right™ back then.

I hate all of them, use only when it’s almost inevitable, so I can’t really have an objective opinion.

Oh it was mocked back then too—mostly for the pre-npm@3 releases that didn't dedupe. If you thought node_modules was big today, imagine what it was like then.

Though it clearly worked well enough to be fantastically successful despite valid complaints about it.

Early npm would regularly create directory trees so deep Windows couldn't delete them, and I was just using it to pull down LESS and friends.

It’s the most successful one but okay.

Success has nothing to do with quality.

It's a good story though.

Why not?