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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

(nolanlawson.com)
160 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 20 Oct 24 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.417s | source
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porcoda ◴[20 Oct 24 22:23 UTC] No.41898983[source]▶
Sometimes it seems that people who write these kinds of pieces forget that not everyone in the world does web or even web-adjacent work, and node.js is something we don’t even consider to be part of our ecosystem. Rewriting useful things in non-JS has the benefit of letting folks like me who avoid JS like the plague use useful tools. Stop assuming everyone wants to get anywhere near the JS ecosystem: I’ve gone 30 years without touching it, and plan to continue that streak. Rewriting stuff is great from my perspective.
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namuol ◴[20 Oct 24 23:01 UTC] No.41899192[source]▶
> Stop assuming everyone wants to get anywhere near the JS ecosystem

The author is writing about JS ecosystem tools.

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1. warpspin ◴[21 Oct 24 14:45 UTC] No.41904742[source]▶
I can partly understand the poster above: Some people (including me) for example want and have to use JavaScript, but simply don't want to get dragged into that whole node.js/npm ecosystem for various reasons.

I avoid any tool which forces me to pull in a gazillion npm packages, while I gladly use esbuild for example because it looks and feels like a nice little compact tool.

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2. namuol ◴[21 Oct 24 17:53 UTC] No.41906560[source]▶
I feel the same way about python, but I don’t blame python authors for using the python ecosystem to write python tools when I am forced to use a little python. I consider python to be an essential part of any build system since it’s used in so many places, as much as I don’t like it.

Maybe the problem people have is that node/npm are becoming a similarly “essential” build system piece much like python. That much I can certainly understand.