> Your latter paragraph seems a bit fuddy as people 'just dipping in and out' would never have to have contended with the iojs 'name' any more than Python/Ruby/PHP people have to switch to a different VM every time one is announced (e.g. PyPy/Rubinius/Hack).
One of my main use cases for Node is Zombie, and that required io.js after v3. No mainstream PHP, Ruby or Python application has required a different interpreter.
The io.js situation was more akin to Python 3 vs Python 2 than Python vs PyPy. It might not have looked like a major difference at first glance, but there were notable significant, which came with some breaking under-the-hood changes.
Actually, IIRC it's the exact same reason as the io.js split. The maintainer of jsdom had changes that weren't being merged into node's VM module.
So jsdom 3.x used a lib called "contextify". When io.js was released and the changes included, node support was dropped. Now node 4.0.0 is out and has those changes, jsdom now works on node again.
It was. The maintainer of jsdom decided to no longer support node after 3.x and made the library throw a condescending exception if you tried to run it with node. The docs were also filled with childish "tm" symbols whenever node was mentioned.
I see things like this all the time and it really puts me off OSS.
One of my main use cases for Node is Zombie, and that required io.js after v3. No mainstream PHP, Ruby or Python application has required a different interpreter.