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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?

#531

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#532

Post by mirekrusin »

hacknat wrote: post #399
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.

Edge cases for a padding function? Your comments make me think that the author's point is valid.

Edge case for left padding - when you provide empty string as padding filler. It can go into infinite loop if not written correctly.

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

#533

Post by kristiandupont »

TickleSteve wrote: post #483
tjmehta wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

>hasn't reduced the number of paths to test

But it has: it's now tested, and you don't need to write tests for it next time you want to use it.

>100% test coverage is rarely a good thing

Not sure what your argument is here. Sure, it may not be helpful but are you saying that one should strive for less than 100% coverage, because "it's rarely good"?

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

#534

Post by cyphar »

fastball wrote: post #523
cyphar wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riiiight. Because cryptography is identical to an 12-line string padding function.

I think that was smokeyj's point... the left-pad module is not going to have a "backdoor". nv-vn was creating a bit of a straw man, as no example or particular scenario in this article involved crypto.

No, I disagree with smokeyj drawing a false parallel to encryption to try to justify why you should use an external dependency for 12 lines of code -- because "you should never roll your own crypto" is not applicable here.

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

#535

Post by sebak »

The main reason there is a fetish for these micropackages is a fetish for github stars. The formula seems to be: Overly generic + Simple + Javascript = Lots of stars.

That being said, there is something to be said for using these micropackages. Left padding a string is easy, but you might just have forgotten about that one edge case where in browser X and language Y you have to do things different. It's not really the case here, but things that seem simple at first often turn out to be hard because of some edge cases. One might hope these edge cases are solved if they use a library.

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

#536

Post by kungtotte »

nly wrote: post #134

Nobody has forgotten. These people never knew to begin with. NPM/JS has subsumed the class of programmer who would have previously felt at home inside PHPs battery-included ecosystem. Before that, a similar set of devs would have felt at home with Visual Basic. Seriously, go visit the comments section on archived copies of the PHP documentation. You'll find code of a similar nature. If PHP had had a module system 10+…

I think the languages themselves give rise to such code because of the lack of consistency and all the weird quirks everywhere.

When you can't even reason about the truthiness of a variable because the language coerces everything, of course things end up screwy.

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

#538

Post by avz »

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…

> Small modules are easy to reason about

Flip-side: it isn't easy to reason about a large and complicated graph of dependencies.

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

#539

Post by nvader »

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…

Just to pick at a nit with you, it's a little meaningless to say "100% test coverage", without specifying whether you're talking about line coverage, branch coverage, path coverage...

This is especially true for one-liner modules in js, where any test at all might let you claim 100% statement coverage, without accounting for branches or loops within method calls.

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

#540

Post by pcwalton »

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.

There are package management systems out there that don't allow package owners to remove existing code in a way that breaks downstream users.
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