Thread by @gravislizard

I hesitate to ask questions like this but... why does Javascript not believe in installing libraries? All the nonsense about downloading 5 megabytes of libs on every page load - those are libs that are used across millions of websites. Why aren't they reused?

To be clear, I believe Javascript is the stupidest shit on the planet made by the most incompetent people so you shouldn't respond if you're one of them because I have nothing kind to say about your industry, but

I don't underfuckingstand why "jquery-2.0.3.min.js" isn't just stored in an SxS library repo within my browser. It makes no sense. Grab it from CDN on first use and just treat it like a system DLL.

DLL Hell in windows is ridiculous because every single program uses a slightly different subsubsubsubsubsubrevision of everything. no two programs have ever been compiled with the same version of the visual c runtime, and that's fine. Windows handles it. Webshit isn't like that.

it's not like jquery has a new version every millisecond that's distributed through murky backchannels like a lot of binary libs. Everything comes from cdn.jquery.net and there aren't, to my knowledge, builds beyond the patch level. there just aren't that many versions.

JS is, ironically, one of the very very few places where this could be handled in a sane way, and it isn't. I regularly wonder if people *want* it to be bad, the way linux people *want* software to not have a GUI just because if computers are hard to use, they look much cooler

javascript is the kid who wants to be treated like an adult but wants help with everything, and argues out of both corners of his mouth - it claims "i'm a person just like you, age is just a number!" and "you can't put all this burden on me, i'm just a kid!" simultaneously

javascript wants to be treated like a grown-up, first-class programming environment while it delivers the behavior of BASIC on the Apple ][. it doesn't deserve the former and owes us better than the latter.

with all due respect to the people responding you all seem to be missing my point. a library isn't a filename at a URL that contains <shrug> who knows what, some bytes, whatever, lol. a library is "jQuery" "Version=2.0.6", a canonical *concept,* an object with metadata

a library should be able to identify itself by a name and a set of semantic version fields, not just "uhhhhhhhhhhhhh there's an object called $ in the global namespace i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

an application should be able to ask for "jquery >= 2.0.3", not "get me a file called jquery.2.0.3.min.js who fucking cares what's inside of it"

i literally can't make ruby *work,* i can't make it execute a program, and i still respect it's meta infrastructure more than javascript.