10 Years of Meteor is a very interesting retrospective from Sacha Greif. Calling it a retrospective might make it sound like Meteor is dead, but it’s not. I’d say it’s fallen out of favor, but that’s not quite right either: Meteor was never particularly popular. What it was: pretty darn innovative. Meteor had serious fans and advocates, Sacha included.

Meteor still feels pretty innovative 10 years later:

… a unified architecture on top of Node.js that bundles client, server, and database all in one neat little package that you can run (or even deploy for free!) with a single command.

What’s more, it was all reactive and in real-time! Can you imagine never having to write a fetch() or worrying about updating your client data cache? And all that using the same familiar MongoDB API syntax both on the server and client!

The verdict on the seven principles is particularly interesting.

My guess why it didn’t take off: it’s too opinionated. Sometimes highly un-opinionated software gets popular because of how easy it is to slot in with other things. Sometimes highly opinionated software gets popular because it gives developers answers and allows you to be productive immediately. But it’s a spectrum. Too far, either way, it either doesn’t provide enough value or feels too restrictive. I worry Redwood is today’s Meteor, and Rome is trying to take on too much.

Also fascinating that Meteor alumni went on to make stuff like Vue, Apollo, and Storybook. All of these, I would argue, are less opinionated and play nice with a larger ecosystem of tools.