411–420 of 887 posts
On the other hand, there's a lot of bad practices disguised as "simple" and "efficient." Using NPM for one line functions is a great example of this.
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Just sugar-coated kool aid I'm hearing. Community benefits? First of all, I'm coding to get paid and this recent madness proved that JS ecosystem is semi-garbage. Back to the original question - do people really can't program that they need packages like left-pad or is-integer which had their own dependencies? Before writing those cool toolchains (which would likely work in a specific machine with a specific setting…
if leftpad were in the node stdlib, would you still be making the same point about knowing computer science and using leftpad? in python: https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/stdtypes.html#str.ljust
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…
The Programmer's Stone first essay is actual as it never been before.
Actually, it is a common pattern. When some activity becomes popular due to very low barrier to enter it will end up in a such kind of mess. It seems like nowadays everyone is either a programmer or a scientist and researcher.
This is the quality of their software and research.
There has been a reason why good schools taught principles (algorithms and data structures) not particulars (objects and classes). But since MIT and Berkeley dropped Scheme-based courses in favor of "pragmatic" Python (thank god not JavaScript) based courses we are heading to a disaster. Java madness taught us nothing.
History is full of examples where assault by mediocrity ruined the whole branches of philosophy, arts and crafts. Instead we have fastfood, mass media, social media and now this mass coding, which combines worst from mass and social.
Just try to compare things like Smalltalk or Plan9 or R4RS Scheme or Zeta LISP of Symbolics or with this stuff.
What would happen to all those NPM projects if GitHub is destroyed? I don't think it will close anytime soon, but lets say, a meteor shower hits GitHub data center or something along the lines of this.
I still find it hilarious that, upon the bulk of SCM use shifting to a DVCS, the first[1] thing people did is run out to build a central hub. [1] For the pedantic, it probably was not literally the first thing; I'm sure some folks went to the rest room, others ate something, still others took a nap.
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…
Putting on your devops hat, whatever your dependencies, from a reliability and reproducibility point of view, you should control your reliance on unexpected decisions of npm or third-party developers. A lot of the panic with npm issues comes from people blindly using the npm registry and then seeing breakages, with no safety net. I hate to say "I told you so" but this is an issue we worried about a lot when considering Node productionization last year: https://medium.com/@ojoshe/fast-reproducible-node-builds-c02...
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…
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> every line of code I write myself is a commitment That's true. However: Every dependency you add to your project is also a commitment. When you add a dependency, you're committing to deal with the fallout if the library you're pulling in gets stale, or gets taken over by an incompetent dev, or conflicts with something else you're using, or just plain disappears. If you add a dependency for just a few lines of code,…
> If you add a dependency for just a few lines of code, you're making a way bigger commitment than if you'd just copy/pasted the code and maintained it yourself. This is a problem with NPM, not with dependencies. With different package management systems with stable builds and lockfiles, then you pin to a specific version and there is no way upstream can cause problems. A lockfile is a pure win over vendoring.
The only way to prevent this is to have your own local server for third party package repository.
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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…
Perhaps another reason for this is that Javascript is inherently unsafe. By relying on these small rigorously tested libraries they are avoiding the need to test their own code, and thus avoiding basic null check or conversion errors. Other languages handle this with compilers, may be strongly typed, and/or have features that don't allow nulls. Javascript doesn't exactly have that luxury. So maybe it makes sense in J…
#include and "-lm"
with
#include #include #include #include …
and "-lsin -lcos -ltan -lsinh …"
Which is nuts no matter what language you are coding in.