Does nodejs suck or am I just inexperienced

Nodejs is kind of at the low end of what I'll tolerate. I avoid it.

A mix of both

Node.js is fine, with certain exceptions.

Perhaps it's NPM and the ecosystem there that you're having problems with.

NPM is terrible. It has only gotten worse over the ~7 years or whatever I've been in the community.

@junon good point. I honestly can't tell at this point if my problem is with nodejs or npm, I just decided to take on a project where the devs have all moved on to other roles and the project has just been disintegrating cause everyone's gone.

It's not my main job so I work on it in the latter half of the day, every day I get a few hours of unscheduled project time to basically do whatever I want to get involved in.

Outdated dependencies took half a day last week to get it sorted out. Today for some dumbass reason I deleted my local repo to pull it fresh again (I didn't make any important changes I was just fucking around and wanted to start fresh today)

And since I did that, I canNOT get it working anymore. As far as I can tell, I did all the same steps that I did last week and I keep getting dependency errors, mostly with node-sass. Now I'm just pissed and my brains not working so I'm leaving it till tomorrow or the day after to look at it again lolol

@baewulf I realize this isn't SO but what errors are you getting? And when (during npm install? trying to run a script? etc.)? Which version of NPM? Did you upgrade to 7? NPM 7 is terrible, you might want to force downgrade to 6 if you're on 7, as it broke a bunch of stuff because the devs were trying to be clever (they're not).

@junon I had given up on this for the day but I thought ur comment was rly kind so I was like "fuck it lemme run this again and see what u come up with" and I took my time calmly and I FIGURED IT OUT LOLOLOLOL

thank u for offering to help I feel like unbelievably relieved ❤️

Basically I was updating ALL dependencies and I don't understand why that was fucking it up but when I only updated the specific dependency from the error it worked (in this case it was firebase)

@baewulf Yep I've been facing this exact issue for the first time starting the last week or so. They might have changed how the platform works, not entirely sure. You're not alone, glad you got it worked out.

If you're feeling adventurous, there's an alternative to npm called yarn (yarnpkg). It's more or less compatible if you're not doing anything wonky, and historically has been a bit more sane and stable than npm.

No promises but it might help you especially since it's a legacy project from the sounds of it.

@theabbie Beat me to it.

@Cyanide to what?

I like node, but after I have finished with the course I'm currently studying, I'm going back to php.

It frustrates me, but I like it. It's just that it's too abstracted for its own good. I come from android/ios development though, which is far more abstracted than node, so maybe that's why it doesn't bother me too much.

@camel Node by itself is hardly abstracted at all. it's more or less a javascript engine with Linux syscall wrappers and epoll.

NPM and the ecosystem surrounding it is probably why you perceive high levels of abstractions. The trick is to find a minimal set of packages that do simple things for you.

@junon yeah, I was talking about NPM, not Node itself.

Take a look at Deno. The new web server project from the author of Node: https://deno.land/

Promises to fix all the stuff he thinks Node is lacking. A better package manager, more built in support for apis like promises and fetch (no more downloading packages just for that), and more built in tooling so that you don't have to config all your preprocessors from scratch.