Regrets by Ryan Dahl on Nodejs

The goal of Node was event driven HTTP servers.

5:04 https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=304
1 Regret: Not sticking with Promises.
 * I added promises to Node in June 2009 but foolishly removed them in February 2010.
 * Promises are the necessary abstraction for async/await.
 * It's possible unified usage of promises in Node would have sped the delivery of the eventual standartization and async/await.
 * Today Node's many async APIs are aging baldly due to this.

6:02 https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=362
2 Regret: Security
 * V8 by itself is a very good security sandbox
 * Had I put more thought into how that could be maintained for certain applications, Node colud have had some nice security guarantees not available in any other language.
 * Example: Your linter shouldn't get complete access to your computer and network.

7:01 https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=423
3 Regret: The Build System (GYP)
 * Build systems are very difficult and very important.
 * V8 (via Chrome) started using GYP and I switched Node over in tow.
 * Later Chrome dropped GYP for GN. Leaving Node the sole GYP user.
 * GYP is not an ugly internal interface either - it is exposed to anyone who's trying to bind to V8.
 * It's an awful experience for users. It's this non-JSON, Python adaptation of JSON.
 * The continued usage of GYP is the probably largest failure of Node core.
 * Instead of guiding users to write C++ bindings to V8, I should have provided a core foreign function interface (FFI)
 * Many people, early on, suggested moving to an FFI (namely Cantrill) and regrettably I ignored them.
 * (And I am extremely displeased that libuv adopted autotools.)

9:52 https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=592
4 Regret: package.json
 * Isaac, in NPM, invented package.json (for the most part)
 * But I sanctioned it by allowing Nod's require() to inspect package.json files for "main"
 * Ultimately I included NPM in the Node distribution, which much made it the defacto standard.
 * It's unfortunate that there is centralized (privately controlled even) repository for modules.
 * Allowing package.json gave rise to the concept of a "module" as a directory of files.
 * This is no a strictly necessary abstraction - and one that doesn't exist on the web.
 * package.json now includes all sorts of unnecessary information. License? Repository? Description? It's boilerplate noise.
 * If only relative files and URLs were used when importing, the path defines the version. There is no need to list dependencies.

12:35 https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=755
5 Regret: node_modules
 * It massively complicates the module resolution algorithm.
 * vendored-by-default has good intentions, but in practice just using $NODE_PATH wouldn't have precluded that.
 * Deviates greatly from browser semantics
 * It's my fault and I'm very sorry.
 * Unfortunately it's impossible to undo now.

14:00 https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=840
6 Regret: require("module") without the extension ".js"
 * Needlessly less explicit.
 * Not how browser javascript works. You cannot omit the ".js" in a script tag src attribute.
 * The module loader has to query the file system at multiple locations trying to guess what the user intended.

14:40 https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=888
7 Regret: index.js
 * I thought it was cute, because there was index.html
 * It needlessly complicated the module loading system.
 * It became especially unnecessary after require supported package.json

15:28 Talks about Deno. https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=928

You've made an amazing note, @Durairaj. It seems you've listened to @ry very carefully.

Can you explain: "If only relative files and URLs were used when importing, the path defines the version. There is no need to list dependencies." ?