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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?

#181

Post by meric »

IMTDb wrote: post #160
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…

Which is why it's so unsuited for writing non in-browser applications. JS was made for a purpose. We hacked it and discovered (or at least made popular) the benefit of having a fully async STD lib, of using callbacks to manage incoming connection and so on. The wise course of action would be to take those very good ideas and bake them in languages designed for web/system programming, and keep improving JS for in-brow…

A in-browser web application requires the left-pad module. Should it include the 500kb library that includes a left-pad function, or import just the 10kb version, which having left-pad function as a module by itself allows?

Yes you can use left-pad module in a browser application using the npm install infrastructure.

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

#182

Post by Macha »

nikolay wrote: post #152
Macha wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Allocate and join an array of blanks just to repeat a string is acceptable?!

I guess I'm also as guilty of looking at input/output rather than implementation here.

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

#183

Post by galistoca »

baudehlo wrote: post #35
raverbashing wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, no Left padding is (almost in all languages) built-in, even C can do it with printf (edited) The problem is not having a library that offers that, but having this micro-module thing as a whole NPM module . No other language does that. If it was inside a string helpers, that's great. But don't make me one single module for just left-padding (or is-integer-number)

JavaScript much to my dismay has no sprintf. It's one of the most annoying omissions ever for server side work.

es6 has one

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

#184

Post by imh »

Unzipped, the source code for GNU coreutils is 30MB (zipped 4MB). This is a great example of a collection of single purpose functions you should never rewrite yourself. There's only one dependency if you want to use them because they're packaged together. With normal desktop code, 30MB doesn't really matter and you can link only what you need. Can you do that with the usual Javascript package managers/bundlers, or would you need to send the whole 30MB package to the client to use one function from it?

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

#185

Post by darawk »

smrtinsert wrote: post #118
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 wish I could say you were joking. At best it comes off as ivory tower idealism, at worst the complete naivete of someone who doesnt code.

I'm not sure if you're saying this of my comment or the OP, but I code professionally every day in this style and it's working out just fine. And the smaller my modules get the better it seems to work.

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

#186

Post by nv-vn »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #51
NathanKP wrote: post #6

I don't see anything wrong with using a pre-made left pad function. Why waste time and lines of code implementing something so trivial when there is already a solution available? However, I agree it is ridiculous to have a dedicated module for that one function. For most nontrivial projects I just include lodash, which contains tons and tons of handy utility functions that save time and provide efficient, fast implem…

I think the article's thesis is essentially that every dependency your project pulls in -- which includes all the dependencies your dependencies pull in -- is a point of potential failure. I understand the "don't re-invent the wheel" defense, but the Node/JavaScript ecosystem tacitly encourages its users to build vehicles by chaining together dozens of pre-made wheels, all of which depend on more wheels, and each and…

Worse yet, a backdoor or legitimate bug in any of these module could leave huge exploits in the entire Node.js ecosystem.

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

#187

Post by morgante »

michaelmior wrote: post #178
morgante wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A version can't be republished.

True, but it's common to have requirements of the form "^1.0.0" (especially since this is the default of npm i --save). It's easy to publish a new version that would be installed by a project declaring a dependency in this form.

Yes, but it's trivial to pin your dependencies exactly. That's not a reason to avoid small modules.

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

#188

Post by UK-AL »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #147
UK-AL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rebuilding for most cases seems silly to me.

I've been working on a .net web app, that's been around since 2008. It's been continually evolved, so it's running on the latest MVC framework, uses microservices etc

As result it's build up a huge amount of automated tests. The business logic has been built up from experience and is well tested even for odd cases.

You throw away a lot of stuff for a rebuild.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #147
UK-AL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by joshmanders »

superuser2 wrote: post #141
jperras wrote: post #58

Earlier 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.

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.

It should, but the ECMAScript spec doesn't have it, and Node.js team prefers to keep the core libraries to a minimum and definitely do not want to modify prototypes. Thus we depend on userland to provide those features for us.
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