The last few years have been dramatic ones in JavaScript. Features people had talked about for years went from ideas, to standards, to features you can reliably depend on in most environments. The speed at which these have been adopted is staggering, mostly thanks to auto-updating browsers and an aggressive Node.js release schedule.
The patterns at the core of request are out of date. A few people might argue with that assessment, and I know who they are so I won’t be surprised, but it’s true. I have often been skeptical of the impact some of these features would have only to find myself adopting them wholesale not long after they are available in only the latest release of Node.js.
There’s a transition happening now in the ecosystem to these patterns. How messy that will be is still up in the air and I’m not going to try and read the tea leafs and figure out what the future looks like in that regard. The question for request is “Do we try to survive through that transition?” A year ago, I thought the answer was obvious and that we would, but now I’m convinced of the opposite.
A version of request written to truly embrace these new language patterns is, effectively, a new module. I’ve explored this space a bit already and have a project I’m quite happy with but it is incompatible with request in every conceivable way. What’s the value in a version of request that is incompatible with the old patterns yet not fully embracing the new ones? What’s the point in being partially compatible when there’s a whole world of new modules, written by new developers, that are re-thinking these problems with these patterns in mind?
The best thing for these new modules is for request to slowly fade away, eventually becoming just another memory of that legacy stack. Taking the position request has now and leveraging it for a bigger share of the next generation of developers would be a disservice to those developers as it would drive them away from better modules that don’t have the burden of request’s history.
