@ladyerrant @feld @nate Ironically NodeJS has a pretty large stdlib (see https://nodejs.org/api/ ), so you can write actual NodeJS programs with barely any dependencies.

Also you can actually install NodeJS libraries in your system, meaning apps with a reasonable amount of dependencies can be packaged just like say Python ones.

So I think for NodeJS the problem is more cultural, and maybe a bit of technical debt as stdlib getting a test runner is pretty recent (that said you totally can write tests in pure JS, the ECMAScript standard itself does that fine).