> I'm not sure why you consider the JavaScript ecosystem unstable ?
Well I'd say his opening might be the reason:
"As the companies I work(ed) for evolve from JS => jQuery => Backbone.JS => Backbone.JS + Marionette => EmberJS, so does my skill have to evolve."
It's evolving fast, and this makes it unstable in terms of knowledge and what's being used. Depending on outlook (or age?) this can make it exciting. It's also a pain in the proverbials to keep up with, and everyone's at different places (while the HN crowd appears to have moved onto Gulp, many people I know are just discovering & starting to use Grunt).
Thousands of plugin says nothing about whether it's a stable ecosystem either: the majority could all be high quality, or they could be scratch-an-itch-and-move-on projects.
Even though the frameworks evolve quickly in JavaScript, nobody is stopping you with sticking to an "older" one if it works for your project.
It's true though that your value as a developer shifts quite fast depending on the trends. But I feel that a fast moving world is merely a consequence of super large communities like the JavaScript one.
By "stability" I meant that NPM and Bower are quite reliable.
Also, if you look at the usage stats for the top plugins, the still show in my opinion stability since you have a lot of devs contributing through pull requests.
I asked myself the same question and although I'm not sure what the answer is, my guess would be that the situation you describe would be valid for any (relatively) new programming language.
It shouldn't be particular to JavaScript or Node.js.
Well I'd say his opening might be the reason: "As the companies I work(ed) for evolve from JS => jQuery => Backbone.JS => Backbone.JS + Marionette => EmberJS, so does my skill have to evolve."
It's evolving fast, and this makes it unstable in terms of knowledge and what's being used. Depending on outlook (or age?) this can make it exciting. It's also a pain in the proverbials to keep up with, and everyone's at different places (while the HN crowd appears to have moved onto Gulp, many people I know are just discovering & starting to use Grunt).
Thousands of plugin says nothing about whether it's a stable ecosystem either: the majority could all be high quality, or they could be scratch-an-itch-and-move-on projects.