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@social.pixie.town hm I wonder what went wro--
"large influx of users"
yep, confirmation bias confirmed
the Javascript ecosystem is essentially a failed anarchist society (long)
@emilis I think that's only half the problem, though - it wasn't *just* an Eternal September-style overrun. There also just genuinely wasn't much documentation on the culture, nor structure to it! The only reason I learned about this at all, was because I literally met one of the early adopters (substack) at a tiny "revolutionary tech" conference.
So I feel like this *could* maybe have been prevented, if there was enough of an established and *documented* culture, instead of relying on word-of-mouth via two dozen early adopters - that probably would also have prevented the hype cycle, though, but that'd probably be a good thing really.
the Javascript ecosystem is essentially a failed anarchist society (long)
@joepie91@social.pixie.town >There also just genuinely wasn't much documentation on the culture
I don't think all the documentation in the world would matter
See, I don't believe this could've been prevented, I see this as a necessary result of things growing out beyond the human scale.