The main cause of bloat is not polyfills or atomic packages. The cause of bloat is bloat!
I love this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince):
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing to take away."
Most software is not written like that. It's not asking "how can we make this more elegant?" It's asking "what's the easiest way to add more stuff?"
The answer is `npm i more-stuff`.
> Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Or Quintilian's praise of Demosthenes and Cicero: "To Demosthenes nothing can be added, but from Cicero nothing can be taken away."
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.
This, too, is the problem with movies and TV shows today. They worry so much about offending anyone they lose the interest of everyone. When was the last time you laughed hard and out loud?
I've been noticing for a while now this is missing in most modern tv shows. It makes the show feel pointless.
if you're developing some sort of dystopia where everyone is heavily medicated, better to show a character casually take the medication rather than describe it.
of course, that's not a rule set in stone. you can do whatever the fuck you want.
You mean the character of a place?
JavaScript seems to be unique in that you want your code to work in browsers of the past and future—so a lot of bloat could come from compatibility, as mentioned in the article—and it's a language for UIs, so a lot of bloat in apps and frameworks could come from support for accessibility, internationalization, mobile, etc.
Lots of developers don't even say they are JS devs but React devs or something. This is normal given that the bandwidth and power of targets are so large nowadays. Software is like a gas, it will fill all the space you can give it since there is no reason to optimize anything if it runs ok.
I've spent countless hours optimising javascript and css to work across devices that were slow and outdated but still relevant (IE7, 8 and 9 were rough years). Cleverness breads in restrictive environments where you want to get the most out of it. Modern computers are so large that its hard for you to hit the walls when doing normal work.
Every C++ app I install in linux requires 250 packages
Every python app I install and then pip install requirements uses 150 packages.
10GB of build artifacts for the debug target.
There's no way the average C++ app uses 250 packages though. It's usually more like 5. C++ packaging is a huge pain so people tend to use them only when absolutely necessary, and you get huge libraries like Boost primarily because of the packaging difficulty.
I would say Python varies but 150 sounds high. Something more like 50-100 is typical in my experience.
For example we often see posts on HN about, "see, it's possible to write very fast software in language foo!" And most of the time yes, especially on modern hardware, most languages do allow you to write surprisingly fast software!
It's just that the people who actually want their software to run fast -- and who want it enough to prioritize it against other, competing values -- those people will generally reach for other languages.
With JavaScript, the primary "value" is convenience. The web as a platform is chosen because it is convenient, both for the developer and the user. So it stands to reason that the developer will also make other choices in the name of convenience.
Of course, there's weirdos like me who take pride in shipping games JS that are eight kilobytes :) But there are not very many people like that.
Not to the language but its users. Not to bash them, but most of them did not study IT on a university, did not learn about the KISS principle etc.
They just followed some tutorials to hack together stuff, now automated via LLM's.
So in a way the cause is the language as it is so easy to use. And the ecosystem grew organically from users like this - and yes, the ecosystem is full of bloat.
(I think claude nowdays is a bit smarter, but when building standalone html files without agents, I remember having to always tell chatgpt to explicitely NOT pull in yet another libary, but use plain vanilla js for a standard task, which usually works better and cleaner with the same lines of code or maybe 2 or 3 more for most cases. The standard was to use libaries for every new functionality )
It sure seems like it is because JS devs, by and large, suck at programming. C has a pretty sparse standard library, but you don't see C programmers creating shared libraries to determine if a number is odd, or to add whitespace to a string.
Believe me, if C had a way to seamlessly share libraries across architectures, OSes, and compiler versions, something similar would have happened.
Instead you get a situation where every reasonably big modern C project starts by implementing their own version of string libraries, dynamic arrays, maps (aka dictionaries), etc. Not much different really.