Damn. Deno is a super old project, in 2018 the Nodejs creator did the talk "things I hate about NodeJS" and introduced Deno. It's 8 years ago now, and clearly even though the project was known by most Node users, it didn't gain any traction at all. I don't even remember "the bad parts" that Deno tries to solve, were they that bad at all ? Anyways Node will keep evolving and implement new features, new standards, optimization. I think it's super risky to move to an alternative. In the age of the LLMs, if you wanna get out of Node, you better translate all to native Go or Rust.

8 years is not super old, or even old. It's important to understand software maturity cycles for core components.

"old" is relative term. Given @TheRogue's account is 4 years old, maybe new to field. If so, it feels "old".

I understand your sentiment of justifying not being "old". but you gotta bring up "legacy code".

"Working Effectively with Legacy Code" defines legacy code as code without tests thus hard to change it easily or with confidence.

So either @TheGuardian is discussing about the age of software relative to his/her perspective or confused "legacy code" without understanding deno code base.

If 8 years is "super old" in terms of software, what is Windows? Or Emacs? Or old Fortran software from the 50s in the Voyager software?

Define "super old" or just "old".

It's relative measurement. When you are 9th grader, even a freshman college student feels way older.

But as you are in your 30s, you feel less of difference.

Same thing here, How do you define Windows and Emacs being "old"? For those who's been using it for decades, not as old as Voyager software. For those who lived through those times, Windows and Emacs feels younger.

See where I am going with it?

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If you have a nephew or a kid, they will say you are "old". But your parents will consider you "young" for the rest of their lives.

In the context of software, I think "how old is old" depends on how web based the software has been over its lifetime.

I think 8 years is old for software that has heavily Web based like Deno. But Windows and Emacs have had portions of their lifetime without the Web in a meaningful way, so 8 years would be young.

ty. I like this over others as it uses the "web" as the basis for relativity.

Ancient

> "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" defines legacy code as code without tests thus hard to change it easily or with confidence.

This is not a universally accepted definition. I've owned plenty of services with 95%+ unit test coverage, massive integ test suites, and synthetic canary tests that ran every minute that I would consider legacy. Plenty of AI slop today gets barfed out with 100% test coverage, but much of it is legacy from day 1.

I aggree thre are many defs. I only used that ex as it's easy to use and understand.

What would you consider legacy? (not trynna fight, just wondering what you consider as one)

Workloads that either are superseded or there is a desire to supersede them. It's not just old deprecated stuff, but also stuff that people want to deprecate.

An example could be old API endpoints only hit by old versions of a mobile app where users may be slow to update. Or a case where only newer clients/instances support modern features and old ones are stuck on a frozen featureset until they cutover.

But active services with no immediately existant alternative may also be legacy. If your auth is behind a disappointing managed service like AWS Cognito, you may consider your entire auth stack legacy while the replacement is still looming in the roadmap down the line. Maybe you can't justify funding to work on a transition just yet, but you already would avoid building on top of the existing tech stack.

It may not be old, but it sure hasn’t caught on much after 8 years. I did remember a lot of posts about migrating cloud functions/lambdas to deno initially, but not much since.

I’m taking the stance that no news is bad news here. If it was good, people would be doing Resume Driven Dev with deno and we would be buried in those articles. Alas.

Also it didn't hit 1.0 until 2020 so it's more accurate to say it's 6 years old.

It's not that old, but it's old enough that it should have gained a bit of traction, it should have been mentioned in more discussions etc. And ultimately adopted more. It's purely a gut feeling though because I didn't run any numbers

> I don't even remember "the bad parts" that Deno tries to solve, were they that bad at all ?

Well node and bun sought to solve the same problems after Deno demonstrated a path. They got to learn from Deno's mistakes as well.

To me Deno died the day it decided to not support npm packages and died again when it started supporting it.

Ironically the reason why I hated it when it was introduced was the reason why they added support for npm (i.e. absolute URLs don't support semver and therefore you will load multiple versions)

In what way does supporting npm packages compromise Deno's design? I don't know a lot about Deno but thought it was more about rewriting in Rust, more batteries included like native TS support, and more secure defaults.

Once Deno's direction became clear, success seemed unlikely.