
JavaScript Growing Pains: From 0 to 13,000 Dependencies - Liriel
https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/05/14/javascript-growing-pains-from-0-to-13000-dependencies.html
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jondubois
I partly blame some of the popular early Node.js and npm community members for
our current situation. Since the early days, they'd been advocating for
developers to publish tiny packages and npm had been actively endorsing and
promoting authors who were extreme in following this philosophy (and who
clearly where mainly doing it to get attention). Some of the authors which
were promoted had published several hundreds of tiny packages.

The people who built React didn't understand the concept of 'over-
engineering'... That's why they started integrating with Babel, WebPack etc...

Babel often introduces hundreds or even thousands of dependencies into
projects, but what does it actually do for the end user of the software?
Absolutely nothing! If you use VueJS without WebPack, you can get the same
results with only a handful of dependencies and your project code will be
cleaner and more stable too.

I feel the same way about TypeScript. Ok it gives you type safety, that's
great, but it turns your project into a vulnerable and non-portable mess.
Suddenly you have hundreds of dependencies that do nothing for the user, you
now need to wait for builds every time you change anything in your code, you
get build artifacts like source maps and definition files everywhere, you
encounter issues with wrong line numbers when debugging because your
environment doesn't know where to find or how to interpret the source maps.
...and now you have to make sure that your project code is not only compatible
with all developers' Node.js versions, but that it's also compatible with
their TypeScript compilers because TypeScript keeps changing all the time and
also TS configs are constantly added and removed.

It's complete madness. Good article.

