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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?

#141

Post by superuser2 »

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.

This sounds like a symptom of an inadequate standard library. I do expect to be able to call "average" on a list of numbers without writing it myself, but I expect that to be part of the language not a 3rd party package.

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

#142

Post by morgante »

This shows the beauty and success of npm in making it very easy and cheap to publish small modules.

It's not that we can't write a left pad function ourselves. It's that we might easily miss an edge case or make a mistake in doing so.

The author seems to be hung up on a preconceived idea of what a package "should" be without actually offering a compelling argument for why a single short function can't be a module.

Yes, every dependency you introduce is a liability. But so is every line of code you write. I'd much rather take the risk on a shared library which can be audited and battle tested by the entire community.

If a function is so easy to write, it's trivial to check out the module's code, review it does the right thing, and then lock the dependency.

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

#143

Post by jsprogrammer »

This post is too dismissive and confuses some topics.

"Packages", "modules", "functions", and other words can mean different things within different contexts. Well-known and tested functions are useful. Putting them in a "package" is just a consequence of how node/npm work. There should certainly be a much, much better implementation of code sharing, but sharing and using well-known, singular functions should be exactly what we are going for.

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

#144

Post by zanny »

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…

This is more a reflection of how bad the JS language is than anything. Real programming languages have means of standardizing the most common UX and simple patterns into a standard library. Javascript is a consortium hell that never gets updated sufficiently, and has no good standard library, so NPM basically replaces the standard library with a thousand micropackages.

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

#145

Post by mastazi »

jestar_jokin wrote: post #77
emidln wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

So, in the context of this discussion... you should make use of micro-modules to reduce code duplication, avoid defects, etc. However, don't expect those micro-modules to be maintained or available in the future; so you need to set up your own package cache to be maintained in perpetuity. Or, you can implement the functionality yourself (or copy/paste if the license allows) and avoid the hassle.

Yeah, I think the takeaway here is something like: "find the right middle ground between reinventing the wheel and dependency hell"

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

#146

Post by Macha »

nikolay wrote: post #88

We have. I spent some time optimizing [0] a String.repeat function over at Stackoverflow and I was surprised that many developers today don't know what they are doing, including core team members [1]. Specifically, function repeatString(str, len) { return Array.apply(null, { length: len + 1 }).join(str).slice(0, len) } [0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/202605/repeat-string-java... [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/…

So I don't think this is an example of core team members who don't know what you're doing.

This function repeats a string up to a certain length. e.g.

repeatString(foo, 10) = foofoofoof

This could entirely be what the developers needed in their code base.

The fact that it doesn't repeat a string N times, is at best, an example of bad naming.

The issue here is that someone unrelated to the core team grepped the node codebase for the term they wanted and threw a function up as a SO answer without understanding what it did.

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

#147

Post by Bluestrike2 »

UK-AL wrote: post #20
mastazi wrote: post #3

Usually, dependency hell doesn't bite you, until it does. Try to rebuild that thousand-dependencies app in three years from now and you'll see ;-) I recently had to rebuild a large RoR app from circa 2011 and it took me longer to solve dependencies issues than to familiarise myself with the code base. Excessive dependencies are a huge anti-pattern and, in our respective developers communities, we should try to circul…

Why did you have to rebuild it?

I can't speak for him, but upgrading really old Rails apps can get complicated very quickly. Especially when you're going across multiple major versions and have to deal with significant changes in Rails behavior and broken gems. "Rebuild" might not be the most accurate way to describe the slow, steady incremental approach you're forced to take (you aren't redoing huge swaths of your domain logic, for instance), but it gets the gist across.

The same goes for almost any legacy app.

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

#148

Post by nathancahill »

jestar_jokin wrote: post #114
nathancahill wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's two points related to that: 1) JS is unique in that it is delivered over the wire, so there is a benefit in having micro-modules instead of a bigger "string helpers" module. Things like webpack are changing that now (you can require lodash, and use only lodash.padStart). 2) JS's "standard" library is so small, because it's the intersection of all of the browser implementations of JS dating as far back…

Point 1 was addressed years ago by Google Closure Compiler, which used "dead code elimination". Also, the Haxe language, which compiles to JS, has DCE. Micro-modules is certainly a solution if you don't want to use pre-processing or compilers. So is copy/pasting, or manually writing your own util libs, which seems safer than relying on third parties to provide one-liners for you.

Eh, to date, a large part of the JS community still recommends including .js files in script tags in HTML. So, while this has been possible for a while, there hasn't been widespread adoption.

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

#149

Post by STRML »

pfooti wrote: post #133
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…

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.

Agreed as well. In fact, I would posit that this wasn't even really a problem until npm@3 came out and made installing dependencies far, far slower. Yet it was necessary; a standard project using babel + webpack installs nearly 300MB (!!!) of dependencies under npm@2, and about 120MB under npm@3. Both are unacceptable, but at least npm3 helps.

I want to plug ied (https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied) here, which both installs about 5x faster than npm@2, yet deduplicates as well as npm@3.

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

#150

Post by morgante »

white-flame wrote: post #127
joantune wrote: post #87

Earlier 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.

...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).

A version can't be republished.
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