Left-pad as a service • Hacker News Board

Re: Left-pad as a service

#171

Post by krinchan » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #8

Hahaha - isn't it hysterical how everyone using npm for small reusable code pieces! Aren't they morons! How stupid of people to trust their package manager to be consistent and correct and return packages they were expecting. How stupid of people to reuse small often used functions that only do one thing well. How does everyone taking the piss intend to protect themselves from this in their OS package manager, or PPM…

I think it's more that people writing libraries are depending on left-pad. You can write the function in almost the time it takes to add and install the dependency.

Furthermore, left-pad didn't really do one thing well. It did one specific subcase of one specific problem well. That's like a tenth of a thing, for a definition of well that basically means "written by a monkey taking an npm tutorial".

This also feeds into an extreme example of the continuing discussion around the cost/value/risks of extensive, transitive dependencies with the general consensus being that you would've been better off writing your own left-pad function 1,000 times rather than forcing the risk of this dependency onto your downstream.

Re: Left-pad as a service

#172

Post by superuser2 » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

deong wrote: post #72

naasking wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a straw man argument. The reason so many people are criticizing left-pad et al is about the cost of adding a dependency. The cost of a dependency for a good package manager is zero, and the cost of not having that dependency is non-zero. So the problem is with NPM, not with adding a dependency.

"Zero" isn't a cost of anything -- there's no free lunch. NPM, like any package manager, pretty much blindly accepts user input. I, as a module maintainer, could happily change every single function in my modules to function whatever() { return "WHHEEEEEEE!!!"; } and check it in. Doing that will result in no fewer problems than just deleting the module entirely, and it's not NPM or any other similar package manager's…

You could, and that's why it's trivial package manager hygiene to pin versions and always test before upgrading versions.

Re: Left-pad as a service

#173

Post by mschulze » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

As a Java developer, I am a bit jealous. When people joke about us we usually only get a link to the Spring documentation of AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean (or maybe the enterprise hello world), but no one ever wrote that as a service. Maybe someone can do that? https://abstractsingletonproxyfactorybean.io seems to be available!

Re: Left-pad as a service

#174

Post by nyfresh » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

100 times on the board http://bit.ly/1RzOIK2

Re: Left-pad as a service

#175

Post by Jordrok » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:39 PM UTC

Very nice! Any plans for integration with http://shoutcloud.io/ ? I would love to have my strings both left padded AND capitalized, but the APIs are incompatible. :(

Re: Left-pad as a service

#176

Post by richerlariviere » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:44 PM UTC

c4n4rd wrote: post #14

This is really exciting!!! I was a bit disappointed that the right-pad will be out only in 2017. I am looking forward to that release because there is a high demand for it now. What kind of load balancing is being used on the back-end? I called leftpad(str, ch, len) with the length I needed and noticed that is not very scalable because it is blocking. A better approach I would recommend to those using it is to call t…

This is why I love Hacker News

Re: Left-pad as a service

#177

Post by sidthekid » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:44 PM UTC

esailija wrote: post #168

huskyr wrote: post #140

Reminds me of Fizzbuzz enterprise edition: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

fizzbuzz npm edition: var zero = require("number-zero"); var hundred = require("number-one-hundred"); var isDivisibleBy5 = require("is-divisible-by-5"); var isDivisibleBy3 = require("is-divisible-by-3"); var isDivisibleBy5and3 = require("is-divisible-by-5-and-3"); var numberToString = require("number-that-is-between-one-and-hundred-to-string"); var fizzbuzz = require("string-fizz-buzz"); var fizz = require("string-fi…

This must be what heaven feels like!

Re: Left-pad as a service

#178

Post by btilly » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

eknkc wrote: post #39

andy_ppp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno; I think it's a balancing act between dependencies and code reuse. I think npm needs to not let people unpublish stuff without thought - that is where the problem is and I'm sure they are thinking about a solution to this. I think a lot of this is implying "don't use micro packages on your package manager, copy and paste code in helpers.js FTW". I've seen people advocating this as if it's a better solution th…

Well, I don't think we can trust NPM on being consistent. They gave away this guy's package to a corp, despite his protest just because they felt like it. I'm not arguing if it was the correct decision or not, it's just an arbitrary decision based on isaac's mood that day. It's best to treat NPM as mutable and don't depend on it. For example, I check in node_modules to git, even though everyone says no, use shrinkwra…

Not exactly, "just because they felt like it."

But rather because they didn't wish to lawyer up for a trademark dispute that they had no particular reason to want to be involved in. (One where there was a reasonable chance that they would lose.)

Re: Left-pad as a service

#179

Post by marssaxman » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #78

apalmer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no this is the fundamental engineering issue... there is no magically mythical perfect package manager, and even if one exists there is a real intrinsic cost to adding a dependency. It is not a huge cost... it is minor... but the benefit of using a one line package is also minor... so when you are making a minor trade off over and over again as with npm where its not unsually to end up depending on 1000s of packages.…

I never said perfect, I said good. Some basic properties are that upstream changes don't break downstream dependents if you've protected against automatic version updates.

And yet, automatic version updates seem to be the first thing people bring up in defense of package managers when I mention that I generally think they're a poor strategy.

It's a lot like DLLs/shared libraries, actually: people marshal the same old arguments every time explaining why they are a great idea in theory, but in practice, there seems to be a whole hell of a lot of work being done to make up for the fragility you bring on board with a system like that, and I'd rather just embed the source or link it statically (depending on which context we're talking about here) so that I don't have to waste any time thinking about it.

Re: Left-pad as a service

#180

Post by paulclinger » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:48 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #36

c4n4rd wrote: post #14

This is really exciting!!! I was a bit disappointed that the right-pad will be out only in 2017. I am looking forward to that release because there is a high demand for it now. What kind of load balancing is being used on the back-end? I called leftpad(str, ch, len) with the length I needed and noticed that is not very scalable because it is blocking. A better approach I would recommend to those using it is to call t…

Best practice for performance for large left-pad jobs is to call the service recursively using mapreduce. Remember that left-pad(str,pad,n) is equal to left-pad(left-pad(str,pad,n/2),left-pad("",pad,n/2),n). This should run in logarithmic time and is highly parallelizable. If you don't like the "" magic string in there you could replace it with a call to left-pad(null, null,0).

You should be using emptystring.io instead of the "magic string" or a "null, null" hack.