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Discussion on: What Makes Good Developer Tools... Good?

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Tierney Cyren

To answer my own question and kick things off, I'll say what I think makes npm good:

  • 100% extensible: npm has an incredible amount of defaults that you can change and tweak to make it work for you, down to the registry that you're pulling modules from.
  • Low barrier to entry: To get going, you really only need two commands – npm init and npm install. Once you've got those down, you're able to move on and learn more complex commands as the need arises.
  • Powerful for experienced users: I've been using npm for ~5 years now and get a lot of value out of commands like npm ls, npm audit, and npx but still end up learning new features of the CLI on a weekly basis.