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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?

#232

Post by spankalee »

monitron wrote: post #212
sdegutis wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

asm.js is proof that a compile-to-JS language doesn't necessarily have to discard the correctness of its number types. A statically typed language can do a lot. Integer values can be can to int32 via `| 0`, longs can be emulated with two numbers (GWT does this).

The tradeoff is speed, especially for dynamically typed languages. Having to check your operand types in JS before doing work is a performance killer.

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

#235

Post by sillysaurus3 »

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.

I'm not sure dead code elimination works in that situation. Consider:

  var obj = {
   a: ...
   b: ...
   c: ...
  }
If a, b, and c are functions, there is not necessarily a way to determine at compile time whether they will be used at runtime.

  var prop = webrequest();
  obj[prop]();
In that scenario, a, b, and c cannot be eliminated. But it would be worth testing Google Closure Compiler to see what it does in what scenarios.

I've heard ES6 modules solve this problem, but it seems like dynamic access to an ES6 module might still be possible, which would cause the same problems for DCE. Perhaps no one writes code that way, so it doesn't necessarily matter. But what about eval?

There are lots of tricky corner cases. It seems better to use small atoms than a monolithic package.

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

#236

Post by meric »

NPM modules can be used on browsers. On browsers, space is a premium.

Why would you want to install a 500kb dependency that has only one function you need, when you can install a 10kb dependency that has it?

Would you want each of your five 20kb dependencies to re-implement the same 5kb function, increasing the code you must send to the client by 20%, or would it be more optimal for each of those dependency to use the same 5kb function?

The author rants about practices of developers from different programming environment, without experience, without figuring how things came to be. If he did give an effort to think from the perspective from Node.JS developers he’d have addressed the previous two points.

This is like going to a friend’s house and complaining everything is put in the wrong place. It would have been wise to immerse in Node.JS conventions and observe for a while before making comment.

EDIT: Reply to scrollaway:

I've also understated the problem.

Let's look at the problem in the current Node.js environment, it's not uncommon for a web app to have 20 dependencies, each of those have 10, and each of those 10 have 5. That's a total of 20 times 10 times 5 = 1000 dependencies in total.

Let's say you were to remove a 10 line library function that's "standard library-like", used by 15% of those dependencies, and have each of the existing dependencies re-implement that in each of those dependencies that uses it.

15% times 1000 times 10 lines is 1500 lines of code.

So if you're going to troll a solid argument by nitpicking, do it properly and get the details right.

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

#238

Post by cyphar »

smokeyj wrote: post #199
nv-vn wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Worse yet, the OS is compromised. This is why I hand roll all my encryption libraries. /s

Riiiight. Because cryptography is identical to an 12-line string padding function.

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

#239

Post by Klathmon »

AgentME wrote: post #201
peterjmag wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another interesting argument for micro-modules: https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama/issues/10#issuecomment-1...

Wow, I feel like I could have written this. Back when I used Python, I had a folder full of functions I would copy-paste between my projects. (And maybe some of the projects contained unit-tests for the function. I didn't always keep those tests in sync.) Updating them was a pain because inevitably each one would get slightly modified over time in each project separately. Eventually, I bundled all of them into a bund…

I feel exactly the same.

There is something about JavaScript that makes people go a little crazy both for and against it.

I've never seen so many programmers advocate copy/pasting code before...

But regardless of how many insults get thrown around, or how many people seem to think JS is useless or that it's a horrible language, its probably my favorite (and I've done professional work in non-trivial applications from C and C++, to Java and go, to python, Ruby, and PHP to BusinessBasic and even some lisp).

I'm going to keep writing stuff in JS, and I'm going to keep loving it. Regardless of how many people are telling me I'm wrong.

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

#240

Post by rubber_duck »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #229
kbenson wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doea code size really matter to node.js ? And how common was commonjs (no pun intended) on the client before ES6 ? Also doesn't commonjs bundling add a significant overhead when talking 5 line function modules ?
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