The way I see it, our over-dependency (sorry for overloading the phrase) on Javascript as the de-facto web language has the pendulum far in one direction. How much longer can we keep this up? What's the maximum capacity of a developer ecosystem before dependency-hell and framework churn reaches critical mass? This is still a complicated information system - how far can it scale? What's the breaking point?
There's so much amateur work and muddied merit-sense-making of what's good software, who to listen to, and how to move forward - my feeling is that pendulum is just about at peak.
But what of the newbie developer? Is he/she going to just roll their own dependencies and do so in a way that's tenable? Green developers make up most of the category.
I guess I was trying to approach a few concerns beyond just dependencies: learning curve, conventions/standards, framework volatility, and merit assess-ability of ideas.
The more people involved (popularity), the greater the difficulty to parse the merit of an idea without pre-existing competence. How easy is it for a new developer to find a cogent way of doing things in Javascript land compared to a smaller more specific ecosystem? In the smaller ecosystem the experts are easier to determine due to a smaller population, whereas in Javascript-land there's so many people, opinions, articles, and conventional disparities; a much more challenging exercise.
This sounds like a problem pretty unique to Javascript, honestly.
I think if you saw a professional C++/C#/F#/LISP*/Clojure dev etc pulling in a dependency to do IsOdd you'd rightly laugh at them... Yet in JS, that just seems like an acceptable thing to do.
I don't understand why the standard is so low. Is it because of all these learn Javascript / Web development in 12 weeks bootcamps?
There's so much amateur work and muddied merit-sense-making of what's good software, who to listen to, and how to move forward - my feeling is that pendulum is just about at peak.