As a developer, I love JavaScript ecosystem for some of theses drawback of this package manager.
I'm be able to quickly publish a library on NPM and this is great IMO. Few years ago, I tried to do it for Maven in Java and it was a nightmare.
> We don't need two million packages. We probably don't even need two thousand.
I don't think so. There are many tools, frameworks and libraries in JS and I love that. I learn from all of them and this is exciting. I don't want an ecosystem with only JQuery to do all I want. Sometimes I may use Vue.js, sometimes Angular or React... and that's great.
Why is it great to be able to publish a package quickly? You may be a smart programmer who only releases production quality, bug-free, vulnerability-free code, but is it a good thing that it is easy for inexperienced developers or malicious users to be able to publish packages at the same ease/speed?
No one wants an ecosystem with only jQuery, but there's a middle ground somewhere before you get to 2 million packages. Competing frontend frameworks fit comfortably within that space. I just don't want a world where there are 16 competing packages that all implement a slider in React.
There's a huge difference if you only use npm for personal projects, too. The consequences of picking unmaintained/undocumented/insecure/buggy software are much, much lower if you can afford to rewrite/throwaway in a weeks time.
I'm be able to quickly publish a library on NPM and this is great IMO. Few years ago, I tried to do it for Maven in Java and it was a nightmare.
> We don't need two million packages. We probably don't even need two thousand.
I don't think so. There are many tools, frameworks and libraries in JS and I love that. I learn from all of them and this is exciting. I don't want an ecosystem with only JQuery to do all I want. Sometimes I may use Vue.js, sometimes Angular or React... and that's great.