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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?

#211

Post by artine »

sdegutis wrote: post #155
lsiebert wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Every once in a while, I come to HN, and inevitably find a post about some new JavaScript technology on the front page, wherein I find some comment that gives me a new appreciation for the web app language I use at work, which fortunately is not JavaScript.

I'd be interested to know what language it is.

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

#212

Post by monitron »

sdegutis wrote: post #155
lsiebert wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Every once in a while, I come to HN, and inevitably find a post about some new JavaScript technology on the front page, wherein I find some comment that gives me a new appreciation for the web app language I use at work, which fortunately is not JavaScript.

What is the web app language you use at work? I assume you're talking about something that runs on the client -- a web browser -- so it probably compiles down to JavaScript, right? JS literally has no numeric type that isn't a float, so how does your language escape this fundamental limitation?

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

#213

Post by wodencafe »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #206
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 comes up a lot when people discuss anything related to npm modules. It's easy to simply dismiss these trivial one-line modules as "insanity" and move on, but there's actually plenty of good reasons as to why many prefer to work with multiple small modules in this manner. This GitHub comment by Sindre Sorhus (author of over 600 modules on npm) is my favorite writeup on the topic: https://github.com/sindresorhus/a…

But this doesn't address the author's point that each module, each dependency is an additional point of failure.

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

#214

Post by baudehlo »

mayank wrote: post #70
baudehlo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

require('util').format gets you pretty close.

No it really doesn't. It is so far away from even Perl's printf (considered ancient by most JS programmers) that it is not even funny.

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

#215

Post by kbenson »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #206
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 comes up a lot when people discuss anything related to npm modules. It's easy to simply dismiss these trivial one-line modules as "insanity" and move on, but there's actually plenty of good reasons as to why many prefer to work with multiple small modules in this manner. This GitHub comment by Sindre Sorhus (author of over 600 modules on npm) is my favorite writeup on the topic: https://github.com/sindresorhus/a…

The simple rebuttal to that is that modules that are collections of small functions are easy to reason about as well, and don't the downside of increasing the metadata management to useful function ratio nearly as much. Why have just an average (mean) function, when it makes sense to provide a median and mode as well? Even then, you might find that there's a bunch of extra math operations that are useful, and you might want to include some of those.

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

#216

Post by pkrumins »

Yes, we have.

The entire Javascript ecosystem is a huge catastrophe. It will collapse any time soon. It's complex, fragmented and no one really likes it. There are a dozen different tools to get started. No one even understands how to get started easily. There are no fundamental tools. Everything is changing every week. You can't just build a product and then rebuild it even a month later. Nothing works anymore a month later - your dependencies have changed their APIs, your tools have different flags that do different things, there are new data models that you never needed and shouldn't even care about.

The developers are in high stress. Devops engineers are in even higher stress because they get to see what developers don't.

It's a huge mess and my advice to "prefer core-language solutions to small abstractions to small helper libraries to general libraries to frameworks" (http://bit.ly/1UlQzcH) hasn't been more relevant than today.

Software should be developed using least amount of complexity, dependencies, effort and using fundamental tools that have been and will be here for the next 20 years. Cut those dependencies, you don't need them. They're here today and won't be here tomorrow.

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

#217

Post by baudehlo »

galistoca wrote: post #183
baudehlo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

es6 has one

No it doesn't. It comes with template strings. Any sprintf type functionality requires you to call functions on the input. It is a tiny tiny step forward.

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

#218

Post by lucb1e »

Yeah look at all these modern languages that do so much for you, like .empty() on an array -- have we forgotten how to do simple comparisons?! You could just take a second to consider the properties of an empty array, namely it contains no items (.count() == 0).

My point being, if something is a completely reusable and basic feature, a dependency is totally just. I remember a few years ago when I and all devs I knew (which weren't many, I was maybe 17) had our own libraries to include in all personal projects we made. It contained features we had to look up once and from then on just automated and imported, stuff like password hashing or input checking. This went out of style as single-programmer programs are going out of style, but the little useful features are still there.

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

#219

Post by meric »

nick32m wrote: post #200

What's the problem of writing a function with a few lines of code and exports as a module? I think it's totally fine. Like other people said, it's the mindset we borrow from Unix, do one thing and do one thing well. The function would be well tested, and could be reusable. I don't understand why so many people just require lodash into their project (when they start project) while they only use one or only minimum set…

Also, Node.JS modules can be used browser side. On the browser you only want to include code you're using so you're not making the client downloading excessive code. A large 500kb module with one useful function is worse than a one 10kb module with the one function you need.
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