I use Nim everyday so I am based, but previously I used JS. And it felt like the JS libraries where just not good quality. It seemed NPM was full of old, broken and unmaintained libs. Some of them did trivial things. I was never happy with their quality. For me JS had the quantity, but not the quality?
With Nim, yeah there are way less libraries, but the ones it does have some how feel better. Also when there isn't you just write your own code specific to your missing use case. Which is not that not much code and fits better.
I think one of the biggest issues we currently suffer in the programming field is the use of libraries upon libraries, layers upon layers, without understanding.
> I think one of the biggest issues we currently suffer in the programming field is the use of libraries upon libraries, layers upon layers, without understanding.
I think there’s a balance here. We obviously are way better off with all the layers we’ve built, whether it’s compiler optimizations or kernels or VMs or runtimes or.. or..
We have some widely accepted abstractions and layers like “android” or “Linux” where we don’t question the underlying code too much and we just accept and appreciate it. They’re also heavily maintained for us. 20 layers of left pad? Not so much.
It’s almost the standardization problem. We need bigger and more feature-rich runtimes and standard libraries as we tackle more complex and bigger problems. But if every dev has to chart their own path through 1000000 combinations of libraries and runtimes and components, we can’t -as a society- maintain them and battle test them with the same rigor. Like containers, we’ve started to build established norms and tools (docker, oci, etc) freeing us from all the details, when the abilities were always there within Linux.
It's true there are a lot of low quality js libs, but there is also a vast number of high quality lobs too, you just need to search them out. From my experience, libs written in TS tend to indicate a higher quality.
The main issue with JS and Node was the number of small libraries that do one thing, and the over use of them. If you stick to a framework, Lodash (rather than lots of small libs) and any specialist libs you need it all works really well.
With Nim, yeah there are way less libraries, but the ones it does have some how feel better. Also when there isn't you just write your own code specific to your missing use case. Which is not that not much code and fits better.
I think one of the biggest issues we currently suffer in the programming field is the use of libraries upon libraries, layers upon layers, without understanding.