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NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

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Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

#121

Post by pfooti »

sauere wrote: post #78

> There’s a package called isArray that has 880,000 downloads a day, and 18 million downloads in February of 2016. It has 72 dependent NPM packages. Here’s it’s entire 1 line of code: return toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]'; How anyone can deal with JavaScript for more than 5 minutes is absolutely beyond me

Sensationalist stuff. isArray doesn't depend on anything, but lots of other packages depend on it. Why? Because it's actually kind of hard to tell the difference between an array of things and an object with integer keys. The Array.isArray function wasn't added to the language until ES5, so you need a way to shim older tests.

If you're writing only for modern browsers, you don't need it (if you actually visit the code in question you'll see it defaults to Array.isArray - in that sense, it's a polyfill or whatever). But if your code might run on old browsers, it can't hurt to have it, and it cleanly encapsulates a trick that you no longer have to remember the syntax for.

Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

#122

Post by ORioN63 »

darawk wrote: post #28

Everything in this article is categorically wrong and antithetical to every principle of good programming ever articulated. The only problem here, as others have already noted, is that NPM allows people to delete published packages. Small modules are not evidence of a problem, and they certainly aren't evidence of an inability to implement these things on the part of the people depending on them. Why would I implemen…

I don't know why you were downvoted, but I agree with you 100%.

Pure functions are indeed a good target for modularity and deserve proper documention and proper testing, at the very least.

For the readers of this comment:

* How many functions did you not commented last time you wrote some code?

* How many functions do you leave untested?

* How many functions did you wrote more than once?

* How many "trivial" functions did you wrote that actually took you 3 hours, because it's actually tricky, so you checked other implementations and tried to wrap your mind around it.

Check haskell's hoogle to a small sample of this concept.

Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

#123

Post by michaelbuckbee »

jperras wrote: post #58
runin2k1 wrote: post #7

Holy moly-- is-positive-integer/index.js: var passAll = require('101/pass-all') var isPositive = require('is-positive') var isInteger = require('is-integer') module.exports = passAll(isPositive, isInteger) I retract my previous statements that Javascript programmers are going down the same enterprise-y mess that Java programmers went down a decade ago. They've already taken it to an entirely different level of insani…

Similarly, the `average` package on NPM is one that I came across: https://www.npmjs.com/package/average var average = require('average'); var result = average([2, 5, 0, 1, 25, 7, 3, 0, 0, 10]); console.log('The average for all the values is:', result); It's hard to not stare at that in complete disbelief; someone thought that it was worthwhile to create a package for determining the mean of an array of numbers.

I'm thinking that someone wanted to learn about building and publishing a package and the ecosystem so they made this computationally trivial thing as a practical exercise.

Pretty much every package management system gets cruft in it like this. Example: for a long time someone had uploaded a random Wordpress core install into Bower.

Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

#125

Post by ars »

atjoslin wrote: post #11

Counter-argument: A good micro-module removes complexity. It has one simple purpose, is tested, and you can read the code yourself in less than 30 seconds to know what's happening. Take left-pad, for example. Super simple function, 1 minute to write, right? Yes. But check out this PR that fixes an edge case: https://github.com/azer/left-pad/pull/1 The fact of the matter is: every line of code I write myself is a comm…

What's wrong with copy/paste?

Why do you need an external dependency on something so small?

Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

#127

Post by white-flame »

joantune wrote: post #87
ksenzee wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every line of code I write myself is a commitment That's true. However: Every dependency you add to your project is also a commitment. When you add a dependency, you're committing to deal with the fallout if the library you're pulling in gets stale, or gets taken over by an incompetent dev, or conflicts with something else you're using, or just plain disappears. If you add a dependency for just a few lines of code,…

OR: you depend on a specific version of the library, that you know that works, and you have none of those problems.

...and then the publisher pulls their library off npm, and another shows up and drops one of the same name in its place, with compatible version numbers (by happenstance or otherwise).

Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

#128

Post by mastazi »

emidln wrote: post #102
mastazi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. But I find two problems with your proposal: 1- Maintaining a mirror of dependencies can be a non-trivial overhead. In this app that I was working on, the previous devs had forked some gems on github, and then added that specific github repo to the requirements. But they did not do it for every dependency, probably they did not have time/resources to do that. 2- As a corollary to the above, sometimes the prob…

This problem is solved by mirror dependencies and pinning the versions. Even against a git repo, pinning to a particular sha is something that is possible. Automatically upgrading versions (i.e. not pinning versions) in a production build is an anti-pattern. These sound like problems incurred due to a previous lack of software engineering rigor. As an industry, when we encounter challenges like this we should be lear…

Of course pinning the versions and identifying the particular commit in the Gemfile would have solved it, as long as it was done for every package, otherwise we are back at problem n. 2 in my post above.

In this particular case, there were just 3-4 requirements (out of more than 100) that were pointing to a git repo, and only one of them also specified a particular commit. The other "git-requirements" were just cloning the latest commit from the respective repo.

> Automatically upgrading versions (i.e. not pinning versions) in a production build is an anti-pattern.

We did not have access to a production version, only to a git repo, that's the very reason why we had to rebuild in the first place. I can imagine all versions were locked when the system went into production years ago.

Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

#129

Post by onli »

raverbashing wrote: post #17
runin2k1 wrote: post #7

Holy moly-- is-positive-integer/index.js: var passAll = require('101/pass-all') var isPositive = require('is-positive') var isInteger = require('is-integer') module.exports = passAll(isPositive, isInteger) I retract my previous statements that Javascript programmers are going down the same enterprise-y mess that Java programmers went down a decade ago. They've already taken it to an entirely different level of insani…

Yeah, I thought the dependency thing was a joke (I mean, to have a package for is positive integer is already a joke, but come on) Really

I think it actually is not. That's from some years ago and my memory of it is fuzzy, but at that time it was surprisingly hard to check whether a variable is a positive integer – maybe it was a negative one though and that was harder? You'd think it is just checking whether it is an integer and bigger than 0, or just checking whether it is bigger than 0. And it is. But to get that code to work reliably, regardless of whether it gets a string or float or an undefined, with the JS type system of that time and in multiple browsers, even the crappy ones, that took some time. There was one specific edge case involved.

Not that it was impossible, but I still remember having to search for it and being astonished that that was necessary.

Sure, should not apply anymore like that.

Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

#130

Post by lsiebert »

jperras wrote: post #58
runin2k1 wrote: post #7

Holy moly-- is-positive-integer/index.js: var passAll = require('101/pass-all') var isPositive = require('is-positive') var isInteger = require('is-integer') module.exports = passAll(isPositive, isInteger) I retract my previous statements that Javascript programmers are going down the same enterprise-y mess that Java programmers went down a decade ago. They've already taken it to an entirely different level of insani…

Similarly, the `average` package on NPM is one that I came across: https://www.npmjs.com/package/average var average = require('average'); var result = average([2, 5, 0, 1, 25, 7, 3, 0, 0, 10]); console.log('The average for all the values is:', result); It's hard to not stare at that in complete disbelief; someone thought that it was worthwhile to create a package for determining the mean of an array of numbers.

You know what's worse? Javascript numbers are all floating point numbers, which means integers are 53 bits long. So, you might think this library would try to address issues this can cause, but nope, this is the average statement you'd write if you didn't know was a mantissa was and had never heard of big.js, bignumber.js, decimal.js, crunch.js or even strint (which represents integers as strings because wtf not).
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