the Javascript ecosystem is essentially a failed anarchist society (long)
What it used to be:
- many early adopters were anarchists/communists/etc.
- a huge public commons of highly reusable, high-quality, collaboratively developed libraries on npm, built for the benefit of the public, not for profit
- high degree of interoperability between different people's work, no need for pointless busywork to redo the same work over and over again
- successful(!) 'community specs' designed through community consensus (Promises/A+, CommonJS, etc.), gaining near-universal adoption
- fundamentally different structures from other language ecosystems, both technical and social, to make this work
What went wrong:
- large influx of users from other ecosystems due to hype in startup circles, unfamiliar with the established practices and reasons why
- early adopters failed to effectively convey and explain the ideological basis
- corporate adoption and subsequent capture; increasing "business value", leading to corporate steering of many essential pieces of the ecosystem (language spec, Node.js, etc.)
- npm became npm inc., a for-profit corporation, eventually being acquired by Github due to its large userbase, placing control over the public commons and its namespace in private hands
- ideological basis was forgotten, early adopters eventually left for greener pastures, now an almost purely parasitic environment of people leeching off the commons without guarding its integrity or health
- community-consensus specs started being replaced by "official", by-decree-from-up-high language specs (CommonJS -> ESM, Promises/A+ -> ES Promises)
- widespread adoption of these "official" specs, even though they were in many ways worse, due to their "official" label and many people assuming that what a central authority says must be correct or better
- rapid increase in shiny, well-marketed new tooling that is not interoperable with the existing ecosystem at all, and frequently works less well
- more and more commercial/proprietary 'sidecar' services (eg. Snyk) that you are expected to use, sometimes replacing open initiatives
- now an ecosystem and public commons that is rotting in every aspect with no real hope for recovery
... we should probably learn from this?
the Javascript ecosystem is essentially a failed anarchist society (long)
@joepie91 Huhhh.
I wonder if we can take JS back somehow, with e.g. an NPM alternative.
the Javascript ecosystem is essentially a failed anarchist society (long)
@IceWolf I'm not optimistic, unfortunately. The thing is that the problem extends beyond just npm - the collaborative, consensus-based culture has rotted away at every level (despite attempts for several years to change that), including the language core team itself. It's incredibly difficult to wrest away that control from a now-established hierarchical power structure, especially one this big and influential.
I still tried to work on changing it for many years because of the large existing ecosystem, the large public commons to save - but that public commons has been rapidly falling apart over the past several years, and I now feel like it's gotten so bad that it's genuinely easier to start from scratch with a new language + community that establishes the right culture upfront :/
