Can you explain in your own words why supporting the world's leading package manager system makes Deno "drop what makes it special"? Does it make any sense to argue against gaining access to all conceivable dependencies?
I greatly prefer a project that is willing to reconsider its founding principles than sticking dogmatically to them even when they are being harmful to the project and its users.
I'm seeing poorly advised commenters in this thread trying to argue that reinventing the wheel is simpler than just using industry standards that are readily available and "just work".
> Linking to a package requires a lot of components, a lot of systems. The problem that I have with [package.json] is that it gives rise to this concept of a module as this directory of files, where that wasn't really a concept before, where we just had JavaScript files. ... It's not a strictly necessary abstraction. And package.json has all this unnecessary noise in it.
> ...
> [In] Deno I want to simplify the module system, so screw all this stuff about how Node modules work... it can't be compatible with Node, otherwise you end up building Node, so there's no attempt at compatibility with existing software.
> > [In] Deno I want to simplify the module system, so screw all this stuff about how Node modules work... it can't be compatible with Node, otherwise you end up building Node, so there's no attempt at compatibility with existing software.
I think that Deno's module system is still incompatible with Node's: supplying a node_modules directory of files in your project root, at run time or at build time, still won't work. Deno is now just doing the work to ingest npm packages and process them into Deno modules at build time, if you want to use them. That doesn't seem out of line with Dahl's vision to me.
What, exactly, do you mean by this? Just that NPM is where the most publicly available JavaScript code lives?