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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?

#421

Post by erik14th »

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…

How is that superior to copypasting from a stackoverflow answer?

If it's a popular issue, lots of people had the same issue, many will be nice enough to add their edge cases and make the answer better, most will not. Same goes for contributing to a package.

With a package you would be able to update when someone adds an edge case, but it might break your existent code and that edge case may be something that is not particular to your system.

If you don't want to get too deep in the issue, you can copy paste from SO, just the same you can just add a package.

If you want to understand the problem, you can read the answers, comments, etc. With the package you rely on reading code, I don't know how well those small packages are documented but I wouldn't count on it.

The only arguments that stands are code reuse and testability. But code reuse at the cost of the complexity the dependencies add, which IMO is not worth the time it'll take you to copy and paste some code from SO. Testability is cool but with an endless spiral of dependencies that quite often use one or more of the different (task|package|build) (managers|tools) that the node ecosystem has, I find it hard to justify adding a dependency for something trivial.

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

#423

Post by joesb »

neolefty wrote: post #292
hepta wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if lodash itself was unpublished? I'm having a hard time drawing a line here, obviously a 10 line function is too far on the bad side of lazy, but I can't tell what is an acceptable dependency.

I think it would be annoying but recoverable. It's used so widely that somebody would republish it, at worst under a different name. Edit: But there would sure be a period of chaos.

So it's the same with pad-left. But some how people are wrong for depending on pad-left.

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

#424

Post by joesb »

dozzie wrote: post #79
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…

> 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? I'll tell you why. The least important ones is that downloading such trivial module wastes bandwidth and resources in general (now multiply this by several hundred times, because of dependency fractal JS sloshes in). I would also spend muc…

TIL Java/.NET/Perl/Python/PHP/Ruby are all wasting bandwidth forcing people to download there leftPad bundled in their SDK.

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

#425

Post by spotman »

Every single dependency you import should make you nervous. You would look at it like hiring someone. You are letting go of some responsibility. You are letting go of some control. The end result might be better than you could do in-house, but it might not. But you are already hoping that it's better, and giving up control.

Save these for the things you can not do in house, like NaCL. Don't write that yourself.

But string padding, sorry. Any developer worth their salt would laugh at adding a dependency for this. It's irresponsible, and comes across as amateur hour.

This is a simple case of optimizing for responsibility. The inexperienced programmer does not know how to do this, because they have not spent enough time being responsible, and having to deal with the fallout of managing responsibility poorly.

An experienced programmer carefully manages responsibility. A simple function, that is easy to understand, easy to test, and easy to reason about, is something that makes more sense to either pull all the way into your codebase, or write yourself.

Years of doing this means that managing dependencies should never be just slap it into your packaging system and start using the function. If you are on the line for making the wheels turn for a large scale platform that is directly connected to a monetary transaction of some nature, you will quickly find yourself preferring to remain responsible for everything that you possibly can control. There is certainly enough that you can't control to keep you on your toes.

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

#426

Post by Bjartr »

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?

If you want to build is-bigger-than-5 yourself, I recommend pulling in fivejs[1] as a dependency.

[1] https://github.com/jackdcrawford/five

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

#427

Post by rycfan »

vacri wrote: post #390
CGamesPlay wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And when a bug is found, instead of fixing it in one place once, you now have to hope that all of your deps and all of their deps update themselves appropriately.

Which is great if you are one person and you fix the bug in your own code. What you're ignoring is that if everyone writes their own version, then the same problem exists. That bug has to be fixed across every (buggy) implementation. A well-defined dependency system where it is easy to discover and update to a new version isn't a matter of hope.

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

#428

Post by ubernostrum »

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.

Remember that download counts for package indexes are often misleading. Between scrapers, deployments and continuous-integration systems (all of which download a package -- in the case of CI, sometimes it downloads on every single test run), hitting the thousands-of-downloads level is not hard at all.

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

#429

Post by chipsy »

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…

My dependency strategy over time has moved towards more static, project-owns-everything behavior, and specifically "one synchronization script per dependency" - including my own utilities library. The script leaves a echo of the timestamp so that I can also see when it was updated.

That way, different projects can have different versions of everything, and system environment is only important to the synchronization step - trivial to fix up if needed, trivial to copy between machines.

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

#430

Post by robodale »

I'm content and happy not knowing what the fuck this is all about. Pad left? Are you kidding me? If your tower og babel fell because of your reliance on some script kiddie's toy project, I am happy and content knowing you get what you deserve. Law of leaky abstractions, motherfucker.
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