The tragedy of running an old Node project

> 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

Other ecosystems usually do not have problems to the extent the author had.

I am deep in the Python ecosystem, and I love Python, but I have to admit that Python has the same issue. Reviving a medium-size project after 4 or more years usually means I have to catch up on a lot of new surprising deprecations. That's not because there's anything wrong with Python; it's more of an economic issue: the authors of active libraries have little or no economic incentive to support old, deprecated versions, so they just don't. That's life in the modern world. It is a deep problem that should theoretically affect every large software ecosystem because very few library authors can predict the future with great accuracy, and very few open source library authors have any significant incentive to support old ideas.

> That's life in the modern world. It is a deep problem that should theoretically affect every large software ecosystem because very few library authors can predict the future with great accuracy, and very few open source library authors have any significant incentive to support old ideas.

I disagree. This is an easy problem to avoid with minimal due diligence, people just choose convenience and make unnecessary tradeoffs.

* Use the standard library (ironically not available for Node projects). It will be built with better backwards compatibility almost every time. What deprecations do occur will likely be VERY WELL documented with much quicker adaptions.

* Limit third party dependencies. Do you really need an ORM for your apps 40 sql queries? How long would it take you to scaffold it with GenerativeAI then make it production-worthy without the ORM? 1 hour? 5 hours? 20 hours?

* Pick technologies with better track records. Maybe don't use Beta software like Swift Data for your iOS App. Maybe choose golang for your API even though it'll take a little bit longer to build it.

And this is how you end up with rewriting the world and spending more time rewriting dozens of existing libraries to avoid adding them as dependencies and less time working on the problem you're actually trying to solve because you're fixing the same dozen bugs that the first person already went through the trouble of fixing for you had you simply used their library instead of eschewing it and having to learn everything that they had already learned for you. Often times because the problem space is deeper than you could have known before getting into the weeds and hopefully you don't get bit by sunk cost and decide to do yourself a favor and just use a library instead of continuing to work on solving problems that aren't related to what you set out to do.

There's a balance to be struck between LeftPad scenarios and "Now there are 37 competing libraries".