Oh Node...

Maybe that was a pun. I didn't intend it to be, but if it makes you smile, there it is.

I am quite pissed off with NodeJS right now.

Context

A few minutes ago, I opened a web app project from 2 years ago (according to the git commit). I had a quick look at the project structure. It's a NextJS app. Awesome, go me. I used a fresh modern framework with practically no extras. I mean, I added SASS. Forgive me. What would a sane JS developer do? npm install and start a built-in development server? That is what I thought too...

💥 BOOM! 💥

Babel and webpack errors oh my. Grrr... How and why would this be the case? I am using Next for goodness sake. Isn't Next supposed to handle this low-level transpilation and compilation for you?

I don't care if I am using a version of Next that is 5 major versions old. At one point it worked just fine. Why would it magically not work now?

Frustration

I enjoy modern Javascript. But boy have I grown to hate Node. If anything slows down my productivity on almost a daily basis and causes headaches, it's Node.

I would rather have to wait 10 mins for npm install to fully download everything my project depends on as long as it works every time.

And I am not even touching package-lock.json... What a mess. A developer should not have to maintain two separate files that contain information about dependency versions.

I know I am not the only developer with Node issues. But if the problem is this large, the community should be working on a solution right?

Yarn was a failure. It tried to do what npm does, but better. But that doesn't fix the underlying issues of Node package dependencies.

Hope

Not sure how everything will shake out in the community. But I have heard good things about deno. Let's all hope that deno allows us to code with modern Javascript while not having to stress about our dependencies and whether they will work out of the box after two years.