Node frameworks are famous for this purely because of a lack of standard library. I feel like most languages have a standard library that balance being generic but still providing utilities of common used stuff. So a company that doesn’t want to rely on a random guy’s library can build their own with only the features they want. But with Node, any complicated feature is using a tree of hundreds of random packages that you have no idea who created them.
Node frameworks are famous for this purely because of a lack of standard library. I feel like most languages have a standard library that balance being generic but still providing utilities of common used stuff. So a company that doesn’t want to rely on a random guy’s library can build their own with only the features they want. But with Node, any complicated feature is using a tree of hundreds of random packages that you have no idea who created them.
I believe the nodejs fiasco is what prompted this comic?https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/
AMP-free url: https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/
Another example is a large number of libraries using an external dependency to check if a number is odd.
It’s possible leftpad was an example Randall was thinking of, but the date of the comic is Aug 17, 2020, more than 4 years after leftpad.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency
I believe it was the OpenSSL-security scandal, iirc.