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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?

#31

Post by monochromatic »

atjoslin wrote: post #11

Counter-argument: A good micro-module removes complexity. It has one simple purpose, is tested, and you can read the code yourself in less than 30 seconds to know what's happening. Take left-pad, for example. Super simple function, 1 minute to write, right? Yes. But check out this PR that fixes an edge case: https://github.com/azer/left-pad/pull/1 The fact of the matter is: every line of code I write myself is a comm…

Padding a string is a one liner. I'm perfectly happy to write it, test it, convince myself that it works, and then forget about it and just use it.

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

#33

Post by magicalist »

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…

it's a module with exactly one dependent module -- by the same author. Daily WTF material but who cares beyond that?

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

#35

Post by baudehlo »

raverbashing wrote: post #24
atjoslin wrote: post #11

Counter-argument: A good micro-module removes complexity. It has one simple purpose, is tested, and you can read the code yourself in less than 30 seconds to know what's happening. Take left-pad, for example. Super simple function, 1 minute to write, right? Yes. But check out this PR that fixes an edge case: https://github.com/azer/left-pad/pull/1 The fact of the matter is: every line of code I write myself is a comm…

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.

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

#36

Post by ghamrick »

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 isn't your average everyday darkness.... this is Advanced Darkness." - S. Squarepants

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

#38

Post by xdissent »

In the case of left-pad, 2538464 of its 2550569 downloads last month are attributed to dependents of the line-numbers package (https://www.npmjs.com/package/line-numbers). So it would appear that relatively few people directly rely on left-pad, which highlights the importance of vetting the dependencies of dependencies.

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

#39

Post by fweespee_ch »

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…

> 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 implementations of solutions for common tasks.

I think that was largely the OP's point tbh. Using something like lodash [a utility library] is fine while using a module [for a single function] is not.

It might have gotten lost in the ranting from on high but I don't think the author truly meant more than that.

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

#40

Post by joshmanders »

raverbashing wrote: post #24
atjoslin wrote: post #11

Counter-argument: A good micro-module removes complexity. It has one simple purpose, is tested, and you can read the code yourself in less than 30 seconds to know what's happening. Take left-pad, for example. Super simple function, 1 minute to write, right? Yes. But check out this PR that fixes an edge case: https://github.com/azer/left-pad/pull/1 The fact of the matter is: every line of code I write myself is a comm…

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)

Uh, no Left Padding is NOT built-in in JavaScript. The proposal to add `String.prototype.padLeft()` was just added to ECMAScript 2016.

JavaScript had a very minimal standard library, it's pretty asinine of you to compare it to C or any other language with a pretty extensive standard library.

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