Maybe some people just want to claim they have a published module. Making them feel some sort of achievement or glory.
NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
221–230 of 887 posts
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#222[deleted]
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#223Earlier 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.
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).
That's not true. In most javascript implementations, integers will be represented by real 32 bit integers.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#224Nobody 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+…
PHP has had an extension module repository since 1999
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#225Another explanation for the flourishing of these one function modules may be the fact that some people feel a kind of high/achievement from being able to say they have a published module out there. A sort of bragging rights if you will.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#226Nearly everyone has had it drilled into them the "Don't reinvent the wheel." nonsense for better or worse. I use lodash in almost every javascript project I start, big or small because it makes my life easier. I'd rather use the lodash isArray than roll my own. https://lodash.com/docs#isArray
Yeah but you're loading an entire library to use one function?
Tree shaking.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are definitely trade-offs involved when making decisions to inline vs import.
Strictly speaking, you're definitely right. Each dependency is an additional point of failure, but so is each additional line of code you inline.
The benefits of these small modules is that they're very thoroughly tested by the entire community. I'd say for most cases, they will be much more robust than any solution an individual developer can spontaneously whip up.
Of course, these modules don't exist in a vacuum, and infrastructure failures such as this one do pose another point of failure you wouldn't have with inlining code, but I think in this particular case it had more to do with the failure of npm to adhere to package management best practices to not include an unpublish feature.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#228Relevant: '"The Excel development team will never accept it," he said. "You know their motto? 'Find the dependencies -- and eliminate them.' They'll never go for something with so many dependencies." In-ter-est-ing. I hadn't known that. I guess that explained why Excel had its own C compiler.' http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html
Considering the fact that Excel had to run on multiple versions of Windows and also run on the Apple Mac I can understand why they would hate hidden dependencies.
I've experienced the joy of trying to make sure Win32 code runs on Windows 3.11 (with Win32s), Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, NT, 2000 and XP.
Generally it all works, but sure enough there are times when a small code change breaks one or more of those platforms.
Luckily these days things are much better as Win32 is a lot more consistent.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mig…
With the advent of ES6 modules's selective imports and tree-shaking, that's definitely quickly becoming a better approach. With the old CommonJS modules, you need to be concerned about overall code size, which is where small, single purpose modules excel, and why this approach has proliferated to this degree.
Re: NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?
#230Holy 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…
You'd have a good point, if all of those tiny but probably useful modules were given the use you're describing.
Discoverability though is so poor that most of those modules are most likely just used by the author and the author's co-workers.
If a typical npm user writes hundreds of packages, how the hell am I supposed to make use of them, when I can't even find them? Npm's search is horrendous, and is far from useful when trying to get to "the best/most supported module that does X" (assuming that random programmers rely on popularity to make their choice, which in itself is another problem...).