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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?

#501

Post by pjtr »

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.

Your own mirror of third party packages is definitely the way to go. I'm continuously stunned this is not standard practice.

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

#503

Post by nnq »

...maybe it's time a committee of really smart people sit and sip through all the most used modules below N lines of code or smth, and just write an opensource JS-stdlib, hopefully merging in top 30% most used methods of Lodash too? Node/NPM is a great example of why too much democracy and decentralization is bad. Just gather some experts and have them centrally plan a "standard library" then impose it as "industry standard" have a recommended "no fragmentation policy" like "no forking" and "use it all or not at all", the hell with your web app's need for "performance"... even a few hundred Ks of code will not hurt anyone nowadays ff sake...

I even consider PHP a "more sane" language because you at least have most of the useful utility functions in a global namespace and everyone uses them. Of course, the real ideal on this is Python's solution: a nice set of standard libraries that you know are baked in, but most of them you still import explicitly - hence it's pretty easy to write even large Python applications that have a small and comprehensible number of dependencies!

(And more generally: our strike for "more efficiency" in programming is stupid imho! I'd always take a less efficient solution, even "less safe/tested", if it's more "understandable" and "explainable" and sometimes, paradoxically, making things a bit more monolithic and centrally planned makes then orders of magnitude easier to reason about for our tiny ape brains...)

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

#504

Post by gone35 »

elwell wrote: post #154
jperras wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like the author was aiming for something to put on his resume: e.g., "Author of 25 libraries on NPM, some with more than 500K downloads." etc...

That plus perhaps some kind of dopamine kick these people get out of this whole charade... Sindre Sorhus keeps describing himself as an "Open Source addict", after all.

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

#505

Post by [deleted] »

nnq wrote: post #503

...maybe it's time a committee of really smart people sit and sip through all the most used modules below N lines of code or smth, and just write an opensource JS-stdlib, hopefully merging in top 30% most used methods of Lodash too? Node/NPM is a great example of why too much democracy and decentralization is bad . Just gather some experts and have them centrally plan a "standard library" then impose it as "industry…

[deleted]

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

#506

Post by sina »

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 agree that Lodash would be a better choice because it seems like a well maintained project. There could be two counter args, in theory:

- if the programmer uses other functions included in Lodash his code will have a single larger point of failure. For example, if Lodash is unpublished (intentionally as in this case, or unintentionally) then the programmer will have a lot more work to redo.

- Lodash introduces a lot of code, while the programmer only needs one of its functions to pad a string.

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

#508

Post by esailija »

Someone wrote: post #312
anexprogrammer wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if I was interviewing the guy, my second or third question would be "tell me about these packages you published on NPM" It's going to be damn hard to make an average function sound impressive.

In JavaScript, the API could be fairly complex. Thing is, JavaScript doesn't have arrays of numbers. So, what should the function do if the array passed in contains a null , an undefined , a string such as "7", "012", "008", or "2+3", a function, another array, a hash, etc? I can easily see this grow into a function accepting options indicating such things as "null values are zeroes", "ignore null values", "evaluate…

Yes it does: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Type...

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

#509

Post by gone35 »

jdonaldson wrote: post #418
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…

author of over 600 modules and 1200 lines of javascript.

Wow, you were not kidding. I chose a random package of his [1], and indeed: a grand total of 1 LOC...

This is madness.

[1] https://github.com/sindresorhus/float-equal/blob/master/inde...

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

#510

Post by tmptmp »

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…

it reminds an apt proverb: missing forest for the trees.

Too many modules do not necessarily become a good thing. They may appear to get rid of complexity but in reality, you will have to face the complexity some level above and in fact, the sheer number of small modules will most probably add more complexity of themselves.

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