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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?

#51

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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 think the article's thesis is essentially that every dependency your project pulls in -- which includes all the dependencies your dependencies pull in -- is a point of potential failure. I understand the "don't re-invent the wheel" defense, but the Node/JavaScript ecosystem tacitly encourages its users to build vehicles by chaining together dozens of pre-made wheels, all of which depend on more wheels, and each and every one of those wheels has a small but non-zero chance of exploding the next time you type "npm update."

(And, y'know, maybe it's because I'm not a JS programmer, but the notion of looking for a module to implement a string padding function would never have even occurred to me.)

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

#52

Post by ocdtrekkie »

bronson wrote: post #21
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

My current programming project, my goal has been to do as much in-app as possible. Does that mean I'm more likely to have bugs in my own code? Yes. But I've learned a ton doing it, and I know that my code doesn't have a giant monster of bloat hidden behind some random dependency somewhere. And yeah, that means when I wanted to handle email, I learned a heck of a lot about how programs handle email. Did it take more t…

Spoken like someone who doesn't have a tight deadline.

That's true, I don't. But if your deadline is too tight to do it right, maybe you need to reevaluate your project plan.

I mean, I can certainly see using more dependencies than I'm using. Mail is a great example of something that probably should be handled by dedicated, well-tested code. But to carelessly dump piles of third-party dependencies in your project to save a few minutes, as talked about in this article... just crazy.

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

#53

Post by Twirrim »

fweespee_ch wrote: post #39
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…

> 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 implementations of solutions for common tasks. I think that was largely the OP's point tbh. Using something like lodash [a utility library] is fine while using a module [for a single…

For what it's worth, that's what I read in to it too.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by nikic »

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…

A fun r/programming subthread about this package: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4bjss2/an_11_l...

Those are just the three top-level dependencies. The package has 9 recursive dependencies.

There's also a nice table explaining how a package called "is-positive" managed to reach version 3.1.0.

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

#57

Post by mastazi »

UK-AL wrote: post #20
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…

Why did you have to rebuild it?

Long story... we had the git repo but lost access to any working installation. I had to rebuild a dev vagrant VM first, and later on a production-ish setup on a server.

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

#58

Post by jperras »

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…

Similarly, the `average` package on NPM is one that I came across:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/average

    var average = require('average');
    var result = average([2, 5, 0, 1, 25, 7, 3, 0, 0, 10]);
 
    console.log('The average for all the values is:', result);
It's hard to not stare at that in complete disbelief; someone thought that it was worthwhile to create a package for determining the mean of an array of numbers.

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

#59

Post by BinaryIdiot »

adambard wrote: post #5

I think it speaks to just how lacking the baseline Javascript standard library is. The libraries that come with node help, but all of this stuff seems like it should be built-in, or at least available in some sort of prelude-like standard addon library. The lack of either leads to all these (apparently ephemeral) dependencies for really simple functions like these. That said, I work with Java, Clojure and Python most…

Agreed the JavaScript standard library is poor and instead of addressing it they've mostly just added syntax changes to ECMAScript 6 and 7. It's incredibly disappointing.

For instance I added a utility to my own library (msngr.js) so I could make HTTP calls that work in node and the browser because even the fetch API isn't universal for some insane reason.

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

#60

Post by emidln »

xeromal wrote: post #29
emidln wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try to rebuild that thousand-dependencies app in three years from now and you'll see ;-) This is your fault for expecting free resources to remain free forever. If you care about build reproduction, dedicate resources to maintain a mirror for your dependencies. These are trivial to setup for any module system worth mentioning (and trivial to write if your module system is so new or esoteric that one wasn't already…

Most of the time this is something you inherit. Not something you wrote.

A maintenance programmer should be raising to management the risk if they do not have reproducible builds.

The issue isn't that the company's software has a dependency. The issue is that the company is taking for granted the generosity of others. If they did not get a reproducible build before, they should attempt to get one as soon as they are aware of the problem. If the package is no longer available, they must now accept the punishment in terms of lost staff time or dollars to work around the lack of the dependency.

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