I agree, but Meteor is still young and it actually has a reason for doing it that way. Meteor doesn't have a built-in module system right now, so when you add something like underscore.js to your Meteor project, you don't need to require("underscore"), it's simply available on both the client and server globally.
I feel like they chose to go for convenience rather than consistency with existing practices.
But like I said, Meteor is still in its infancy. It's entirely possible this will all change down the line.
well its called "smart" package manager so perhaps the team believes NPM is a "dumb" package manager? But isn't a package manager suppose to be dumb? Sounds like over-engineering already :P
To me, that's not a compelling reason to avoid using npm. I haven't played around with node that much yet, but Rails uses ruby gems just fine, and it doesn't require require everywhere. Even if you do have to use require in some manifest file, that seems to be a small price to pay to interact with existing code.
I think their design goals is to make it easy and simple to build web applications. If they are building their own ecosystem its because they feel it is necessary to do so in order to achieve that goal.
This talk gives a good intro to Meteor and after watching it, really doesn't seem like they the kind of guys to not embrace NPM if it could work as well for them as building out their own.
I am interested in this. Could you reference something specific to this video that speaks to the kind of guys they are and how these character traits relate to the decision to not embrace npm? (I just don't want to go digging in the video) Or are you just talking about general intelligence?
I feel like they chose to go for convenience rather than consistency with existing practices.
But like I said, Meteor is still in its infancy. It's entirely possible this will all change down the line.