I wouldn't even think of looking for a package that does something as simple as the ones mentioned. If I need to pad a string, my first thought would be to create a new function, not look for a package...
NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
131–140 of 887 posts
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
OR: you depend on a specific version of the library, that you know that works, and you have none of those problems.
You can't escape problems by bundling specific library versions. You just get a different set of problems. When you require a specific version of a library, you're making your code incompatible with anything that requires a higher or lower version of that library. You're also assuming there will never be a security fix that requires you to update your dependency.
...you're making your code incompatible with anything that requires a higher or lower version of that library.
Actually that's not correct when using node/npm (or anything else in the ecosystem like browserify). That is one of the impressive things about this platform: any number of different versions of the same module can be required by the same app. It would be nuts to do that in your own code, but as long as the craziness is in your dependencies it really doesn't matter.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#133Counter-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…
Completely agree here - the problem isn't micro-modules. It's partly just a lacking standard library for javascript and largely just exposing issues in npm that the community was pretty ignorant of until just now.
The whole "amaga, it's a whole package for just ten lines of code" is just elitism. Given the number of downloads on things like left-pad, it's clearly useful code.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#134Nobody has forgotten. These people never knew to begin with.
NPM/JS has subsumed the class of programmer who would have previously felt at home inside PHPs battery-included ecosystem. Before that, a similar set of devs would have felt at home with Visual Basic. Seriously, go visit the comments section on archived copies of the PHP documentation. You'll find code of a similar nature. If PHP had had a module system 10+ years ago you would have seen this phenomenon then. Instead it was copy and paste.
This isn't elitism, it's just the way it is. The cost of a low barrier to entry in to a software ecosystem is taking in those who don't yet have software engineering experience.
Nobody should be surprised that NPM, which I believe has more packages than any other platform, is 90% garbage. There are only so many problems to solve and so few who can solve them well, in any language. Put 100 programmers in a room, each with 10 years experience, and you'll be lucky to find 1 who has written a good library. Writing libraries is really hard.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well a bunch of standard libraries have sum defined, right? JavaScript has suffered from a lack of a standard library for a while. Having a small package like this means that (in theory) everyone is using the same bug free version of summing instead of writing their own. Honestly having JS start building a standard library at this point would be wonderful.
here is the source for that npm package
https://github.com/bytespider/average/blob/master/src/averag...
and here is the code copied out in full
module.exports = function average(values) { for (var i = 0, sum = 0; i is this worth adding a dependency to your build for?
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the time this is something you inherit. Not something you wrote.
A maintenance programmer should be raising to management the risk if they do not have reproducible builds. The issue isn't that the company's software has a dependency. The issue is that the company is taking for granted the generosity of others. If they did not get a reproducible build before, they should attempt to get one as soon as they are aware of the problem. If the package is no longer available, they must no…
I agree with you, but s..t happens.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#137I think it speaks to just how lacking the baseline Javascript standard library is. The libraries that come with node help, but all of this stuff seems like it should be built-in, or at least available in some sort of prelude-like standard addon library. The lack of either leads to all these (apparently ephemeral) dependencies for really simple functions like these. That said, I work with Java, Clojure and Python most…
So many people use lodash as a drop-in standard addon library that I'm surprised people aren't just using the padding functions that are right in there... Some of the packages that broke yesterday even have lodash included as dependencies already!
Looking at the changelog, there have been more than 70 versions of Lodash in less than four years. The first was in April 2012. [1]
_.padleft
So in less than a year "padleft" came and went away because all strings don't start on the left and someone decided that "left" means "start" except that the reason that it doesn't is the reason that it was changed. Even worse, the 4.0 documentation does not document that _.padstart renamed _.padleft. It's hard to grok what cannot be grepped.
Why blame someone for depending on padleft in a world where libraries swap out abstractions in less than a year? Breaking changes are bad for other people. Semantic versioning doesn't change that.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#138What I don't get about Left-Pad, shouldn't they have used Arrays.join for better perormance?
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#139"There are no small parts, only small actors". - Constantin Stanislavski
If there's a flaw to this debacle, it's that packages can be un-published. That is some grade A+ BS.
But no, there is no such thing as a package too small. Coding is hard. Collaboration should be default-on, not default-off.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Try to rebuild that thousand-dependencies app in three years from now and you'll see ;-) This is your fault for expecting free resources to remain free forever. If you care about build reproduction, dedicate resources to maintain a mirror for your dependencies. These are trivial to setup for any module system worth mentioning (and trivial to write if your module system is so new or esoteric that one wasn't already…
There's more to dependency hell than "oops, the package disappeared." Try updating one of those dependencies because of a security fix, and finding that it now depends on Gizmo 7.0 when one of your other dependencies requires Gizmo < 6.0.
Yes that's exactly the kind of issues that I had experienced.