alt Hacker NewsYou might remember the io.js fork of Node.js back in 2014. Node was stagnating, a bunch of people forked it into io.js, which eventually got merged back into Node and got it back on track. Or, going further back, CoffeeScript, a "fork" of JS that had its best ideas adopted back into ES5.
A small scrappy team can prove out a good idea because failure is not a catastrophic risk to them. In short, forks are part of a healthy ecosystem.
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It is still happening, a lot of things are still being adopted by Node after being available on other runtimes. They aren't forks, but they still provide pressure towards progress.
Beautifully stated reminder :)
I had a lot of very good times with CoffeeScript but I'll never forgive it for having implicit returns. So many subtle event-bubbling bugs caused by that.
I almost called it "oi" but I'm not sure anyone would have gotten the joke :P