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Comment by fourseventy | Hacker News Reader

" Codebases from years ago are still rock-solid." This is the biggest thing for me. I recently pulled down an 8 year old hobby Java/Maven project I had and it compiled and ran perfectly on the first try. Imagine trying to get an 8 year old javascript project to work...

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At my previous startup (co-founder who made all technical decisions) we were unfortunately stuck with React Native. I had Mondays that started with the project not building after some dependency changes. Imagine something failing to build 3 days after you've last touched the codebase…

Just did, I installed the version of node specified somewhere, codified it into mise, and was up and running in no time.

You mean like this?

nvm use && npm i && npm run dev

Does NPM work for you in the first place? Much less after 5 years? They’ll have gone through 2 major revisions on their lock file format, and it’ll complain you don’t have the exact version of node specified in your package.json

Oops, one of the dependencies is a C++ library that doesn't compile on your less-than-five-years old arch.

That only works if the project is constantly maintained. Otherwise it can and will break in time.

Ok, 50 packages have critical vulnerabilities now

And another 30 didn't use versioning correctly so they installed new dependencies of their own that broke things three levels deep. Yes, based on a true story.

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