Post #4048529

2026-07-23 21:46 UTC

node and npm are by far the worst things to ever happen to software development. I'm serious. it has poisoned people's minds with absolutely unhinged and untenable approaches to software development and dependency management, and significantly contributed to a global-scale explosion of apathy and dereliction of the duty of care.

Replies (2)

@gsuberland@chaos.social 2026-07-23 21:50

I've got an ongoing project at work to build some tooling to help quantify the complete supply chain risk of nodejs projects, and even in its prototype state (where not all commit-access-equivalent vectors are enumerated) the numbers that drop out of that thing are utterly horrifying.

Open ##4048527
@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems 2026-07-23 21:49

@gsuberland@chaos.social i don't see that. pip and gem both predate node (or if you want to get really vintage, cpan) and they deliver largely the same featureset. probably the main thing npm brings is project-local dependencies, and it's hard to see how that is an apocalyptic outcome i also find the original complaint baffling. nobody yells at an author of a ruby or c++ library "you fucking moron, why do you not publish your shite as a single .rb or .h file?!" yet this is somehow normal for javascript

Open ##4050487