this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
340 points (95.7% liked)

Programmer Humor

31214 readers
359 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Honestly I think the main thing that the JS ecosystem does well is dependency / package management (npm). The standard library is very small so everything has to be added as a dependency in package.json, but it mostly works without any of the issues you often see in other languages.

Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's better than anything else I've tried:

  • Python's approach is pretty terrible (pip, easy_install, etc.) and global vs local packages
  • Ruby has its own hell with bundler and where stuff goes
  • PHP has had a few phases like python (composer and whatnot) and left everyone confused
  • Java needs things somewhere in its $PATH but it's never clear where (altough it's better with Gradle and Maven)
  • C needs root access because the only form of dependency management is apt-get

In contrast, NPM is pretty simple: it creates a node_modules and puts everything there. No conflicts because project A uses left-pad 1.5 and project B uses left-pad 2.1. They can both have their own versions, thank you very much.

The only people who managed to mess this up are Linux distributions, who insist on putting things in folders owned by root.

[โ€“] qqq 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You can use ~/.local/lib and LD_LIBRARY_PATH for shared libs.

Or better yet just give in and use the nix package manager, it is basically a virtual environment for your C programs.