NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by tjmehta » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:31 AM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #63

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…

You should then go dive into the passAll function: https://github.com/tjmehta/101/blob/master/pass-all.js It’s written in such a way that every time you call... passAll(f1, f2, ..., fn)(args..) ... there are something like 5 + 2n attribute accesses, 5 + 3n function calls, 3 + n new functions created, as well as some packing and unpacking of arguments, not including the actual application of the functions to the argum…

Lol, nice, I wrote "pass-any" first. I then copied the code and replaced "or" w/ "and" to create "pass-all".

I will probably have go back and change this now that I know about it. In general though, not gonna a lie, I am not very concerned about micro performance optimizations.

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

#392

Post by brightball » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:31 AM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #73

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…

> Why waste time and lines of code implementing something so trivial when there is already a solution available? Because it's so trivial? I can't wrap my head around why this is an argument in the first place. It makes no sense to bring in a module from a third party adding yet another dependency and potential point of failure when reimplementing it yourself literally takes as long as it takes to find the module, add…

This entire comment thread is such a breath of fresh air. I was beginning to think that I was that guy who was crazy for thinking that all of the people doing this were crazy. This thread is like my new support group.

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

#393

Post by andy9775 » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:33 AM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #384

jay_kyburz wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but, why do you need your own in-house utils library. Node needs batteries included!

Because writing code is what programmers (should) do. If something is simple, then it is simple and won't take up time and energy. If you don't know how to do it, then learning how to do it is worthwhile -- especially if it turns out to be simple. If you make a mistake, then someone on the team must look at the code and understand the mistake. This means that the team learns that things that seem simple are sometimes…

Never understood the fun in importing everything and chaining together someone else's code. Sometimes if I'm building something trivial, a bit of test code or something for fun I'll write up all of it, even if I have to reference others code. You learn so much more.

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

#394

Post by ctvo » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:33 AM UTC

nly wrote: post #134

Nobody 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+…

For a post that is claiming to not be elitist, it reads pretty elitist.

Can you expand on how to identify the class of programmers you're referring to? Are they the type that copy / paste code directly from StackOverflow? They lack a classical computer science education? They haven't worked on a large, enterprise-grade project?

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

#395

Post by zachrose » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:34 AM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #242

idlewan wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another benefit of small well understood components is that they are easier to write tests for. Do these npm modules have good test coverage? Did the leftpad module have a unit test that would have caught the issue?

No, leftpad has four test cases and they are all obvious, given the leftpad API.

Would I write tests for my own leftpad implementation if I were not farming it out to a dependency? Its possible. More likely I would want to understand the intent behind using leftpad in my application or library, and have test for "formatTicket" or whatever it is that I'm actually doing. But for all the talk about tiny modules that cover surprisingly tricky edge cases, this is not one of them.

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

#396

Post by sergiotapia » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:35 AM UTC

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…

DRY taken to the dogmatic extreme where everything is made up and the github stars are the only thing that matters.

This article touches on things that are wrong in the javascript culture. I always had this nagging feeling when working with NPM, this article brings it to light. For what it's worth I never felt this while writing Ruby, C# or Go.

It's the -culture- that needs to change here, not the tools.

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

#397

Post by lewisl9029 » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:35 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #354

lewisl9029 wrote: post #206

Earlier 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…

> TL;DR: Small modules are easy to reason about, and encourage code reuse and sharing across the entire community. How does that even remotely applies to the "is positive integer" test, and even more so to "it's positive" and "it's integer"? What's next? is-bigger-than-5? word-starts-with-capital-letter? add-1-to-a-number?

It doesn't.

Of course we have a number of packages that are truly trivial and should probably be inlined. Npm is a completely open platform. Anyone can upload any module they feel like. That doesn't mean anyone else will feel the need to use them.

I think you'll find that the vast majority of small modules that are widely used are ones that also cover obscure corner cases and do benefit from widespread use and testing.

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

#398

Post by frozenport » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:37 AM UTC

I don't see nobody criticizing 'std::min()'. Perhaps what we really need is a 'std' for js?

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

#399

Post by hacknat » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:41 AM UTC

CGamesPlay wrote: post #315

idlewan wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The isArray package has 72 dependent NPM packages, it's certainly not undiscoverable. The leftpad package gets 5000 downloads a month, that's quite a bit of testing for edge cases, compared to the none that I would have gotten had I implemented this myself. Intuitively, this thread wouldn't exist if your assertion were correct.

Edge cases for a padding function? Your comments make me think that the author's point is valid.

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

#400

Post by simula67 » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 3:43 AM UTC

lewisl9029 wrote: post #373

userbinator wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small modules are easy to reason about Yes they are, in the same way that a book in which every page consists of a single word is easier to understand than one with more content per page. By focusing on the small-scale complexity to such an extreme, you've managed to make the whole system much harder to understand, and understanding the big picture is vital to things like debugging and making systems which are effici…

> Yes they are, in the same way that a book in which every page consists of a single word is easier to understand than one with more content per page. A more apt metaphor would be separating a book into many small paragraphs that each serves a single purpose makes the book easier to understand. Regardless, the book metaphor misses a lot of the nuance. Of course taking the approach to an extreme would be detrimental.…

> A more apt metaphor would be separating a book into many small paragraphs that each serves a single purpose makes the book easier to understand

No, that would not be an apt metaphor for the problem he is describing.

> Regardless, the book metaphor misses a lot of the nuance.

Not if you are trying to understand the point he is trying to make.

Is there any cost to creating modules, uploading them to npm and using them in other projects ? Clearly there is, as is shown by the world-wide breakage from yesterday. This is probably only one of such failure modes.

The point is, breaking everything into micro-modules can have benefits and costs. Ultimately, it is an engineering trade-off.

Now, it is possible that npm modules are at the right level of abstraction, even though other module systems in the world are not this granular. If this is due to the special nature of JavaScript then the point must be argued from that perspective.