What is a bit worrying though is that he is an active member and contributor to TC-39. Meaning that this kind of community hostility is very much alive among the people who rule JavaScript.
8 years later and despite much support for the `.node-version` file.
Someone else started using the .node-version file years ago, and because all open source packages won't form a committee to standardize this file, nvm will not support it.
They have a lot of hills. JS Private Properties was another.
Very often when I’m digging around GitHub Issues because of some bug or quirk or insanity in the JS ecosystem (which is often) I see someone spout the worst possible take - often being kind of a jerk about it - and when I look to see who’s responsible, very very often, ljharb’s name pops up. Often.
Dogpiling on someone deep in an HN comments tree isn’t exactly the classiest thing but…never having interacted with him myself, I’ve been harbouring this low-grade antipathy towards him - nothing unhealthy, just a groan whenever I see his name on GH - for years now, and it’s cathartic and almost gratifying, given his prominence in the community, to feel seen like this. Thank you.
I think we as a community really need to have a conversation about ljharb and his role in the future of our industry. If he was only a library maintainer, that would be one thing, we could just move on, find workarounds, alternatives, etc. But his involvement in TC-39 makes him one of our rulers in a non-democratic structure. That makes this different.
To be fair, the ESM switch has been botched beyond compare.
It’s like they didn’t want to become Python 2/3, and then did the absolute worst possible alternative.
It is beyond frustrating that it’s up to individual package authors whether or not their package supports ESM or CommonJS.
And yeah, it’s a pita when one of your downstream dependencies decides to go ESM only, and breaks your entire friggin chain of stuff that depends on it being CommonJS.
I agree. Mistakes were made and migration has been unnecessarily hard. This particular issue doesn’t even affect me. I simply turned off `no-unresolved`. TypeScript handles a lot better anyway (even with jsdoc type annotations).
But what is the issue here is the stubbornness of the maintainer and his unwillingness to accommodate a very sizable portion of his user base. The industry is moving on, and as a TC-39 member he should be aware of where the community is moving as well as show some empathy with his users.
