Look at the python ecosystem and you'll see that it's not the case. Because of its compatibility commitment, a standard library cannot evolve much and its features end up being replaced with external libs.
Isn't that one of the big justifications for not bundling the standard library?
It seems to me like not shipping the std library with the runtime is potentially one of the biggest language innovations we've seen in awhile because it should allow the std library to evolve over time in a much more graceful way ... -- you'll actually be able to make breaking changes to the std library as folks who are unwilling to update their code can just use the older version (until the ossified code becomes irrelevant which eventually code that is never changed eventually will)
How does it work when you want to use third-party libraries though? (because even if you have the biggest stdlib in existence, you'll still gonna end up using some external libraries no matter what)
Python packages, in general, are much bigger though.
And you'd probably be surprised how much the stdlib is used. In many environments third party libraries have to be vetted by security, or the developers are junior and can't probably check/understand a third party library so they just take the safe option and use the stdlib and hand-code a bit to make it do what they want, etc.
Plus, the third party packages that are used generally have to offer much higher convenience or quality or scope (or all three) to be adopted over the stdlib alternative.
Not really, I mean what do you think is missing from the standard library json package? It obviously solves most use cases since just yesterday flask dropped simplejson. Standard library is just not great for libraries that are not yet stable.
Exactly this. If anything, Deno can help introduce the use of standard libraries as a source of truth to webdevs who may not be familiar with the concept to begin with.
I think you're underestimating just how passionate the Node crowd is on customization and reusability. There are feature-rich, extremely popular packages which act as a stdlib in many ways for particular functions - yet there are constantly alternatives to ecosystem-dominating packages that spring up. Some gain traction, some do not. I don't see this changing, even with a robust stdlib. It's the culture around the toolset that drives this.
The whole "culture" popped up because people wanted to share code between browsers and backends and there's no tree shaking in Javascript, so libraries had to be super small and modular to keep the code small for the front end, where download/unzipping/code parsing/compiling code speed matters.
If browsers get a big stdlib, many of these libraries will just go away (bye, leftpad!).
