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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Then I wish there were more of these "idiots who want to support Node 0.4 in 2026". Maybe they're the ones with the common sense to value stability and backwards compatibility over constantly trendchasing the new and shiny and wanting to break what was previously working in the misguided name of "progress".

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NodeJS has a clear support schedule for releases. Once a version of nodejs is EOL, the node team stops backporting security fixes. And you should really stop using it. Here's the calendar:

https://nodejs.org/en/about/previous-releases

Here's a list of known security vulnerabilities affecting old versions of nodejs:

https://nodejs.org/en/about/eol

In my opinion, npm packages should only support maintained versions of nodejs. If you want to run an ancient, unsupported version of nodejs with security vulnerabilities, you're on your own.

"support" and "works" are two different things.

You wouldn't if you look more deeply at this. He doesn't push for simplicity but for horrible complexity with an enormous stack of polyfills, ignoring language features that would greatly reduce all that bloat. .

That's also a problem. I've written JS that would work on any browser from the latest ones all the way back to IE5, and I'm not even a professional JS developer. It's not hard.

Maybe "professional" is the problem: they're incentivised to make work for themselves so they deliberately add this fragility and complexity, and ignore the fact that there's no need to change.

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