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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?

#481

Post by TickleSteve »

imron wrote: post #462
drauh wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equivalent in C would then be replacing #include and "-lm" with #include #include #include #include … and "-lsin -lcos -ltan -lsinh …" Which is nuts no matter what language you are coding in.

The difference with C is that with a good linker, functions you don't call are removed from the resulting binary (or are maybe not even in the binary if you are dynamically linking to the c runtime). With javascript however, if you import a hypothetical "math.js" instead of just "sin.js", "cos.js" or "tan.js", then you'll need to download and evaluate a whole bunch of javascript that you might not need. I'm not defen…

what you describe is the "-flto" option in GCC and I believe the equivalent in JS is donr by Google Closure compiler.

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

#482

Post by iopq »

joesb wrote: post #419
pcwalton wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, there is. Just like NPM's left-pad case. The owner of the package remove the package from the repository. It doesn't matter if you pin to any version if there is no longer a code to download. The only way to prevent this is to have your own local server for third party package repository.

It's also a problem with NPM, just don't let people remove older versions of things.

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

#483

Post by TickleSteve »

tjmehta wrote: post #339
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…

Author of "is-positive-integer" here. I will admit the implementation is pretty funny, but I move-out all single-purpose utils out of projects to modules for a bunch of reasons. DRY is the most obvious one, but one that may be less obvious is for better testing. I move out modules so I can write really nice tests for the independent of the projects I am using them in. Also, I tend to write projects w/ 100% test cover…

Two points:

- Breaking out is-positive-integer hasn't reduced the number of paths to test. You have not gained anything, you've added overhead.

- 100% test coverage is rarely a good thing. It is required for safety critical areas like avionics. I can guarantee that your JS code is not making into any safety critical environment!

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

#484

Post by rbobby »

bluejekyll wrote: post #407
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…

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…

> basic null check

What's funny to me is that leftpad(null, 6, ' ') outputs " null".

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

#485

Post by 80286 »

mozumder wrote: post #316
jt2190 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discoverability though is... poor seems like an argument for improving discoverability, not against having small modules.

Discoverability happens with standardization. Why search through millions of unknown packages when a standard library would have it all right there?

Yeah, I think the natural question here is: why doesn't TC39 round up all these basic packages and add them to the standard library? I've seen other languages criticized for having too large a standard library, but if this is the alternative...

left-pad was released under WTFPL, so in this particular case there'd be no legal barriers to it. (And I'd assume that, for any libraries with a restrictive enough license, it wouldn't be a hard sell on TC39's part -- if they put out an announcement that they were going to do that, I'd go panning for street cred, and I wouldn't be the only one.)

An alternative could be to pull all this stuff together into one big bucket of Legos and package it with a code analysis tool at the beginning of your build process to strip out everything you don't need from the bucket... but I'd guess that's either already been done or a stupid idea for reasons I don't know yet.

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

#486

Post by TickleSteve »

ktRolster wrote: post #281
spankalee wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

asm.js is proof that a compile-to-JS language doesn't necessarily have to discard the correctness of its number types. A statically typed language can do a lot. Integer values can be can to int32 via `| 0`, longs can be emulated with two numbers (GWT does this). The tradeoff is speed, especially for dynamically typed languages. Having to check your operand types in JS before doing work is a performance killer.

And WebAssembly means that soon it will be practical to use any language on the client or server side.

It already is on the server-side. Feel free to use C; at least it would be performant.

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

#487

Post by adambratt »

overgard wrote: post #320
mastazi wrote: post #3

Usually, dependency hell doesn't bite you, until it does. Try to rebuild that thousand-dependencies app in three years from now and you'll see ;-) I recently had to rebuild a large RoR app from circa 2011 and it took me longer to solve dependencies issues than to familiarise myself with the code base. Excessive dependencies are a huge anti-pattern and, in our respective developers communities, we should try to circul…

> Try to rebuild that thousand-dependencies app in three years from now and you'll see ;-) Let's be honest though, in the current trendy javascript ecosystem these people will already be two or three jobs away before the consequences of their decisions become obvious. Most of the stuff built with this is basically disposable.

Not to mention a good chunk of the companies they were writing this type of code for won't exist by then either...

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

#488

Post by terryf »

So, apparently some guys managed to build a system where it is very easy to re-use small parts of other people's code and now the author is complaining that "too much code re-use is happening" ?

I'm fairly old, so I remember the complaints a decade or two ago that people had where "We can compose hardware from IC's and you don't have to know what's going on inside and it's all standard and just works! Why can we not do that with software?!?! (of course that ended up with things like CORBA and DCOM, which was all wrong)"

aaaand here we are in a situation where code re-use is actually happening on a wide scale and now you're complainig about that?

28k lines in an empty project? ha, how many lines of code does the preprocessor generate for #include I haven't actually measured, but I bet it isn't that far off from 28k lines.

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

#489

Post by visarga »

haddr wrote: post #272

While in general I agree with the article I must admit that I also strongly DISAGREE with the overall message. Especially with this: "Finally, stringing APIs together and calling it programming doesn’t make it programming." Stringing APIs together is what actually programming is. This is building software and for instance when i use .toString() method I can easily forget how it is done, focus on other high level thin…

> Let's admit that the main problem here is with broken npm

It is absurd to have packages suddenly retracted and important parts of the ecosystem stop functioning. This never happened with other languages I have used. Maybe we need a way to make sure the packages are always going to exist. Checksumming and adding the checksum to the version number would be useful too.

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

#490

Post by wiradikusuma »

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…

Why dont they put everything together and call it "commons" like in Java? (commons-lang, commons-io, etc).
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