Jos de Jong

tl;dr The JavaScript community is doing a great job in creating an ecosystem of highly composable, configurable, and extensible components. Unfortunately, this has complicated usage of these components. It is time to focus on the user again. Deliver components with a good default configuration which matches the typical use cases, and ensure a gradual learning curve for more advanced usage of a component. Latest years I see a trend in software libraries and frameworks that make me really happy: libraries have become more and more composable. npm modules in particular have always been small and composable. They support extension and customization via plugins. It’s what makes it possible to combine tools like Gulp, WebPack, Browserify, Rollup, Babel, Mocha, Ava, React, Redux, Angular and many more in so many different combinations and configurations. This is awesome.

It may be the holy grail of programming: writing reusable code. Not getting stuck by inventing the wheel again and again, but moving forward and building on top of what has been done. Looking at what we do today, we still haven’t really figured this out. So you are writing a software library. You had a great idea for a simple, broadly applicable solution. You have cooked up a nice API and are happy with the result. Then, new features are needed. The library grows and grows, and becomes extremely versatile. To account for more and more specific cases though, the API grows at a disproportional rate. Due to this feature creep, soon there isn’t much left from your initial, beautiful API. At some point it becomes almost too complicated to work with the library due to all configuration options and edge cases.