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halapro | on: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat
> WTF is wrong with JS developers

Don't confuse "one idiot who wants to support Node 0.4 in 2026" with "JS developers". Everybody hates this guy and he puts his hands into the most popular packages, introducing his junk dependencies everywhere.

saghm | parent | next
If everyone hates him and thinks his dependencies are junk, why would anyone let him introduce them to popular packages? Clearly there are at least some people who are indifferent enough if the dependencies are getting added elsewhere
Maxion | parent | next
The other problem is that this is a bit of a circular path, with deps being so crap and numerous, upgrading existing old projects become a pain. There are A LOT of old projects out there that haven't been updated simply because the burden to do so is so high.
albedoa | parent | next
The guy you are responding to is longing for what was possible two decades ago. He is that one idiot. He even replied to your comment with confirmation!
userbinator | parent
Then I wish there were more of these "idiots who want to support Node 0.4 in 2026". Maybe they're the ones with the common sense to value stability and backwards compatibility over constantly trendchasing the new and shiny and wanting to break what was previously working in the misguided name of "progress".
josephg | root | parent | next
NodeJS has a clear support schedule for releases. Once a version of nodejs is EOL, the node team stops backporting security fixes. And you should really stop using it. Here's the calendar:

https://nodejs.org/en/about/previous-releases

Here's a list of known security vulnerabilities affecting old versions of nodejs:

https://nodejs.org/en/about/eol

In my opinion, npm packages should only support maintained versions of nodejs. If you want to run an ancient, unsupported version of nodejs with security vulnerabilities, you're on your own.

userbinator | root | parent
"support" and "works" are two different things.
Griffinsauce | root | parent | next
You wouldn't if you look more deeply at this. He doesn't push for simplicity but for horrible complexity with an enormous stack of polyfills, ignoring language features that would greatly reduce all that bloat. .
userbinator | root | parent
That's also a problem. I've written JS that would work on any browser from the latest ones all the way back to IE5, and I'm not even a professional JS developer. It's not hard.

Maybe "professional" is the problem: they're incentivised to make work for themselves so they deliberately add this fragility and complexity, and ignore the fact that there's no need to change.

| root | parent
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