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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?

#281

Post by ktRolster »

spankalee wrote: post #232
monitron wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And WebAssembly means that soon it will be practical to use any language on the client or server side.

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

#282

Post by ktRolster »

spankalee wrote: post #232
monitron wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And WebAssembly means that soon it will be practical to use any language on the client or server side.

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

#284

Post by memracom »

Agreed. Most development groups should be building a local collection of utilities that contains all of these snippets, and most importantly, some documentation of what they do and some unit tests to demonstrate that they are correct.

No need to have global dependencies on small snippets that really should be in a core library anyway. C has libc, Java and C# have the creator's (Oracle or Microsoft) standard set of libraries, Python has the "batteries included" stuff in all the different distros. And so on. All of these snippets rightly belong elsewhere, not in packages.

And even if you did get them added to the right libraries, I guarantee you that you will not get rid of the need for a collection of small, and somewhat random, in-house functions, classes and libraries.

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

#285

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

panic wrote: post #110

Functions are too small to make into a package and dependency. Pure functions don’t have cohesion; they are random snippets of code and nothing more. Who really wants a “cosine” dependency? We’d all really like a “trigonometry” dependency instead which encompasses many “tricky” functions that we don’t want to have to write ourselves. This is a pretty weak argument. What is "cohesion" and why do we care that modules h…

There's a big difference between a "misc" module and a "trigonometry" module.

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

#286

Post by ktRolster »

Klathmon wrote: post #239
AgentME wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm going to keep writing stuff in JS, and I'm going to keep loving it.

Why do you like it? Serious question.

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

#287

Post by memracom »

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…

They do NOT encourage code re-use because the effort required to understand your need, refrain from writing code, and hunt down a module in npm, far outweighs the effort to just write the code and stick it in your in-house utils library.

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

#288

Post by memracom »

Seems that we need a tool to crawl all the repos that a developer owns and report lines of code in each package that they wrote. If there are lots of small packages, then this is not the kind of person you want to hire, except maybe to do PR.

Real developers do not do stuff like this.

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

#289

Post by xupybd »

Have we forgotten how to program? No, we have changed the way we program. We leverage the work of others to solve ever more complex problems. When we do this we get more than just the simple functionality we require. We get all the testing that comes from a package being used by thousands of projects. We get updates when people find a better faster way. We get to lower the number of lines of code we have to maintain.

Yes, these are simple tasks but do we gain anything doing these simple tasks ourselves? I find there is a finite amount of focus I have when programming, and I'd rather spend that solving the bigger problem.

This reminds me of a discussion I overheard between two professors when I was an undergrad. Prof 1 "This new language makes it so much easier to x, y and z" Prof 2 "Yes but what's the point, I can do all these things in Java" Prof 1 "I could do all these things in NAND gates, but I'll get more work done if I have this tool."

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

#290

Post by gsmethells »

The fact that anyone has to even think about code size is the real problem.

Yes, downloading a giant JS lib for one function is insane, hence the ton of tiny dependencies.

However, it is equally insane that basic SDK expectations found in every other language has yet to come to be pre-implemented by the JS engine in the web browser itself. Some basic code ought to already be on the localhost the moment your app arrives.

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