I was part of this discussion in 2009-2012, and was curious if it was still out there. It is!
It's fascinating to take dig stuff up like this and replay it, knowing what we know now.
Of course, everyone is using the new ES modules spec now, but it's hard to imagine how we would have got there without working through the ideas which led to CommonJS.
This started before Node.js, when we were playing around with the Narwhal runtime.
One really interesting concept which never got traction was creating a standard library for JavaScript.
The email threads which led to JavaScript modules (2009) · HackerTrans
It's fascinating to take dig stuff up like this and replay it, knowing what we know now.
Of course, everyone is using the new ES modules spec now, but it's hard to imagine how we would have got there without working through the ideas which led to CommonJS.
This started before Node.js, when we were playing around with the Narwhal runtime.
One really interesting concept which never got traction was creating a standard library for JavaScript.