Today's Javascript, from an outsider's perspective

Today I tried to help a friend who is a great computer scientist, but not a JS person use a JS module he found on Github. Since for the past 6 years my day job is doing usability research & teaching at MIT, I couldn’t help but cringe at the slog that this was. Lo and behold, a pile of unnecessary error conditions, cryptic errors, and lack of proper feedback. And I don’t feel I did a good job communicating the frustration he went through in the one hour or so until he gave up.

It went a bit like this…

Note: N_ames of packages and people have been changed to protect their identity. I’ve also omitted a few issues he faced that were too specific to the package at hand. Some of the errors are reconstructed from memory, so let me know if I got anything wrong!_

John: Hey, I want to try out this algorithm I found on Github, it says to use import functionName from packageName and then call functionName(arguments). Seems simple enough! I don’t really need a UI, so I’m gonna use Node!

Lea: Sure, Node seems appropriate for this!

John runs npm install packageName --save as recommended by the package’s README John runs node index.js

Node:

Warning: To load an ES module, set “type”: “module” in the package.json or use the .mjs extension. SyntaxError: Cannot use import statement outside a module

John: But I don’t have a package.json… Lea: Run npm init, it will generate it for you!

John runs npm init, goes through the wizard, adds type: "module" manually to the generated package.json. John runs node index.js

Node:

SyntaxError: Cannot use import statement outside a module

Oddly, the error was thrown from an internal module of the project this time. WAT?!

Lea: Ok, screw this, just run it in a browser, it’s an ES6 module and it’s just a pure JS algorithm that doesn’t use any Node APIs, it should work.

John makes a simple index.html with a