The node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 2:50 AM, Andrew Berg <bahamutzero8825 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2013.04.16 11:02, Rodrick Brown wrote:
>> I came across this article which sums up some of the issues I have with modern programming languages. I've never really looked at Javascript
>> for anything serious or Node itself but I found this article really informational.
>
> With third-party libraries everywhere, there can easily be duplicate functionality where there doesn't need to be (there could
> be silly bikeshed issues or perhaps one developer simply doesn't know about the other project).

Or, since developers don't know about everything that's available,
they hand-roll equivalent functionality directly into the application,
instead of using a library/module.

One of the problems I had installing a Ruby app was that some of the
dependencies weren't as tidily packaged as could be hoped. I had to
fidget with them to make them build on my system (from C source),
which is something that doesn't particularly bother me (I install
stuff from source all the time), but it did make it rather harder to
deploy the app. Having a larger standard library guarantees that
they'll all work on all formally-supported platforms. Are third-party
extension builders going to guarantee that their code compiles on
platforms they can't test on? I doubt it. Now maybe that's not an
issue with node.js (if everything's written in the high-level
language, platform support is easier, even trivial), but it certainly
would be for Python.

ChrisA