Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

haneycodes.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 887 posts

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

#61

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?

PS I did not downvote you and I find your question legitimate...

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

#62

Post by aub3bhat »

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…

The recursive folder structure in npm-modules was the first indication. At least Java had a single tree with com.bigco.division.application.framework.library.submodule.NIHObject.java

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

#63

Post by jacobolus »

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…

You should then go dive into the passAll function:

https://github.com/tjmehta/101/blob/master/pass-all.js

It’s written in such a way that every time you call...

    passAll(f1, f2, ..., fn)(args..)
... there are something like 5 + 2n attribute accesses, 5 + 3n function calls, 3 + n new functions created, as well as some packing and unpacking of arguments, not including the actual application of the functions to the arguments that we care about. That’s in addition to the several functions defined in the dependent submodules, which you only have to pay for constructing once.

[From my quick eyeball count. These numbers could be a bit off.]

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

#64

Post by mmanfrin »

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…

Shouldnt the Gemfile.lock have prevented that? It takes your gemfile and makes a specific-version locked file of those gems.

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

#66

Post by mozumder »

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…

It really is the fault of the language that something this fundamentally horrible is allowed to exist in itself.

When people ask why Javascript is terrible, show them this.

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

#67

Post by edejong »

sebringj wrote: post #34

This is a non-issue and taking focus away from the real issue. The issue is the security hole that NPM opens up when a namespace can be grabbed up by anyone if the original developer pulls out.

Personally, it's not about the 'original' developer pulling out, but about the simple question: who or what do you trust?

1. The developer, 2. The content distributor, 3. The code (by git SHA ref perhaps), 4. The contract of the code (using formal verification), 5. The legal contract with the code supplier.

And if you trust 1, do you expect of him to sign the stable releases using GPG tags?

All the focus on OSS nowadays seems to be on 1, but as professional engineers, shouldn't we focus more on 4 and 5?

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

#68

Post by nv-vn »

jperras wrote: post #58
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.

And 54 people found it a worthwhile package to install _this week alone_.

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

#69

Post by habosa »

xdissent wrote: post #38

In the case of left-pad, 2538464 of its 2550569 downloads last month are attributed to dependents of the line-numbers package ( https://www.npmjs.com/package/line-numbers ). So it would appear that relatively few people directly rely on left-pad, which highlights the importance of vetting the dependencies of dependencies.

This is in the description of line-numbers:

DEPRECATED. This is a rather silly package that I do not recommend using. It's easier to copy the ~20 lines of code of this package and customize that code, rather than downloading and learning how to use this package.

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

#70

Post by mayank »

baudehlo wrote: post #35
raverbashing wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, no Left padding is (almost in all languages) built-in, even C can do it with printf (edited) The problem is not having a library that offers that, but having this micro-module thing as a whole NPM module . No other language does that. If it was inside a string helpers, that's great. But don't make me one single module for just left-padding (or is-integer-number)

JavaScript much to my dismay has no sprintf. It's one of the most annoying omissions ever for server side work.

require('util').format gets you pretty close.
Post reply on HN