A grumpy Scrooge of a developer might complain about the wealth of options in JavaScript, calling it “tech decision overwhelm.” But the truth is, the JavaScript ecosystem works. In an ecosystem that encourages innovation, new tools are regularly introduced and naturally find their niche, and excellence is rewarded.
As developers, we get to sit back and mouse-wheel through hundreds of thousands of programmer hours of work. NPM is a vast repository of human creativity. What looks like chaos is a complex phylogeny, a family tree of code where tools evolve to find their role in the larger system.
Of course, when you are under deadline and the caffeine’s worn off, you don’t have time to explore your options. But when things are calm—perhaps during the holiday break season—it is well worth taking a deep dive into the open source gifts under the JavaScript tree.
