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The tragedy of running an old Node project

(abdisalan.com)
272 points abdisalan | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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vessenes ◴[18 Nov 24 18:46 UTC] No.42175536[source]▶
This will always be an issue for the node community - it’s endemic to the JavaScript shipping / speed culture and the package management philosophy.

Go is much, much better on these terms, although not perfect.

I’d venture a guess that Perl 5 is outstanding here, although it’s been a few years since I tried to run an old Perl project. CPAN was dog slow, but other than that, everything worked first try.

I’d also bet Tcl is nearly perfect on the ‘try this 10 year old repo’ test

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tpm ◴[18 Nov 24 19:08 UTC] No.42175774[source]▶
Yeah I'd expect 20yo Perl5 stuff to work without issues.

A few weeks ago I was experimenting with a sound generation dsl/runtime called Csound and even most 30yo sources were working as long as they didn't use some obsolete UI.

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1. transcriptase ◴[18 Nov 24 19:21 UTC] No.42175898[source]▶
It’s the same with R. The only thing preventing many ancient packages from running under new versions of R and vice-versa is the fact that the package author simply set the minimum version to whatever they happened to be using at the time.