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The tragedy of running an old Node project

(abdisalan.com)
272 points abdisalan | 4 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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mvkel ◴[18 Nov 24 19:03 UTC] No.42175730[source]▶
> time to run it after not touching it for 4 years

> Two hours of my life gone...

Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable?

And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too

This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill

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mattgreenrocks ◴[18 Nov 24 19:11 UTC] No.42175799[source]▶
Other ecosystems usually do not have problems to the extent the author had.
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1. Supermancho ◴[18 Nov 24 21:02 UTC] No.42177000[source]▶
Maybe they can try to get the node version into the package-lock tomorrow? This seems like an opportunity to improve the ecosystem, rather than a biting critique.
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2. cxr ◴[18 Nov 24 21:17 UTC] No.42177145[source]▶
Or, instead of responding to sunk costs by getting sunk deeper into the muck, just cut your losses, ditch Node and its proprietary/non-standard APIs and unstable featureset, and use a standard runtime.

The author of the blog post is trying to run a static site generator. A static site generator doesn't need to be able to do anything that Node provides that can't be done with the World Wide Wruntime (which they're already going to use to verify the correctness of the SSG output). So use that runtime and tools that target it, not Node.

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3. ◴[26 Nov 24 05:17 UTC] No.42242802[source]▶
4. cxr ◴[30 Nov 24 02:23 UTC] No.42278890[source]▶
Fact: NodeJS's never-standardized APIs that change from release to release are a source of non-negligile breakage and churn for JS programmers who make the mistake of entrusting it to run their programs.

Fact: for a great many programs, NodeJS isn't even necessary to provide the operations that a given program needs in order to do its work, because there exist standardized, vendor-neutral, cross-platform, stable APIs, with broad sort by such companies as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, etc.

Fact: the runtimes that support these APIs are already pre-installed on virtually every desktop and laptop computer.

Fact: you could write a static site generator targeting these APIs today and get a working program today and that will continue to work indefinitely, due to these vendors' commitment to backwards compatibility.