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

"DRY is the most obvious one, but one that may be less obvious is for better testing."

Isn't that why we just write functions? Turning simple functions into entire modules just adds an unnecessary level of abstraction that helps nobody.

This is, finally, the "Fractal Of Bad Design" moment for JavaScript.

The problem here is JS developers have baked in the notion of having NPM as the alternative to Google + StackOverflow + own thoughts. It's really a no-brainer (literally) to just slap another package than to bother thinking about what a piece of code does, the edge cases and pitfalls. Move fast and break things, right?

Sure there was some argument about Unix philosophy, small module doing one thing and does it very well. Did anyone bother considering the quality of most NPM packages? Quality is not reflected with passed Travis CI or extensive community testing and feedbacks. Not at all. Look at the those packages on apt-get. They are modular and robust. They do what they were supposed to do.

Now take a long hard look at the state of NPM. What do we have? People clamoring for reusability and whatnots. Most of them don't even know what they're talking about, just reciting the latest hip statement from the Internet. Being mature about development means accountability for what you do, not pushing shit around that you don't even have knowledge off. As a self-proclaimed polyglot, I love JavaScript as a language but not the ecosystem. It's like watching a dog chasing its tails:

- Endless loops of discussion that help stroke the egos but not improve anything else.

- Craps for resume/repository padding, not for actual developers to use.

- Bandwagon mentality that just pushes the latest fad along, and the herd towards the cliff.

The notion that JS developers are kids playing grown-up, has been reinforced with this NPM incident. If we want to discard that notion slowly, we need to be more mature developers. It's that simple. Here's what I think we could do: - Have a clear idea on what dependency you need. Browser, IDE, terminal etc are dependencies. Basic type checking is not. - Be better craftsmen. Roll and maintain your own toolboxes. Only share a working hammer, not a broken nail or a wood chip. - Note that for each package you publish, thousands more hours would be spent on learning, adapting, using and reporting mistakes. Collectively, the current community wastes so much time with finding the right things to use. Often times, we learn much more by playing with code, even posting on StackOverflow. That's hands-on, `npm i` is not. - Own the code better. The idea that teams like Babel and React devs with all the brilliant developers choose to put their eggs in a private corp's whims is just scary. You can't hope to build robust software while playing Jenga tower.

From what I've seen, there's one division between programmers that's hard to overcome. Some see it as a tool to get certain results for a job. Some of them are bad, some of them are lazy, but most of them are good enough to get to their objective.

Others see programming more as an art. They take care to make the code not only efficient but also elegant. They'll read up on new and interesting algorithms and incorporate them in novel ways. They might often be behind deadlines, but when they are, they create things like GNU Hurd that inspire a lot of interest and lead to interesting results, maybe even teach people a few things. Their code is interesting to read. They tend to write the libraries that the first group uses.

Both groups contribute a lot, but it's not easy to get them to understand that about each other.

Well it has always been like this. In early 2000s most developers I knew would simply copy-paste code from all over the Internet.

Nowadays you use NPM search instead of Google search

The fact is that lazy programmers are lazy. The methods change but the principle remains the same. In 90s people typed in code from magazines and books.