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The tragedy of running an old Node project

(abdisalan.com)
272 points abdisalan | 7 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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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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ivan_gammel ◴[19 Nov 24 13:19 UTC] No.42183093[source]▶
I still can open my decade-old Java projects, run build with modern Maven/JDK and get working code - in a few minutes. Two hours of dancing with a drum doesn’t feel acceptable to me.
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KronisLV ◴[19 Nov 24 14:47 UTC] No.42183987[source]▶
> I still can open my decade-old Java projects, run build with modern Maven/JDK and get working code - in a few minutes.

Try any old Spring project, where anything newer than JDK 8 will be incompatible. The only saving grace is that JDK 8 is still available, but even it will eventually reach EOL. And then you look at JDK 11 projects and realize that they won't run on anything newer due to Lombok issues, so that's another thing to update and fix.

I think the experience of code rot is universal and increases with the amount of dependencies you have.

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1. mperham ◴[19 Nov 24 15:05 UTC] No.42184173[source]▶
> I think the experience of code rot is universal and increases with the amount of dependencies you have.

This is true but there's also a factor from the language/framework in use. Node is especially bad because of it generates huge package dependency trees. Go is especially good because of the large stdlib (which I use to minimize deps in https://github.com/contribsys/faktory) and excellent backwards compatibility.

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2. dilap ◴[19 Nov 24 16:56 UTC] No.42185563[source]▶
Plus even if you were using lots of deps, the Go code would almost certainly keep working, thanks to minimal version selection and the Go module mirror. (And of course for maximum reliability, could even easily vendor deps with "go mod vendor".)
3. guappa ◴[19 Nov 24 20:15 UTC] No.42187619[source]▶
> Go is especially good because of the large stdlib

Come on… compare it with what java and python have.

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4. dartos ◴[19 Nov 24 20:28 UTC] No.42187755[source]▶
What does Java or Python have in their stdlib that go doesn’t?
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5. blizdiddy ◴[19 Nov 24 20:59 UTC] No.42188024[source]▶
Java can't even read/write json without third party libraries.

Tell me a single thing that Oracle has added to the standard library. As far as I can tell, more and more of what was once standard is now getting offloaded and trademark-washed with the eclipse and apache foundations.

6. guappa ◴[19 Nov 24 21:53 UTC] No.42188499{3}[source]▶
Well python has syslog, mmap, just to name a couple of things.
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7. dartos ◴[20 Nov 24 13:29 UTC] No.42193768{4}[source]▶
They had mmap, but it was dropped at some point, I guess.

They do have syslog though https://pkg.go.dev/log/syslog