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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?

#681

Post by chukye »

Man, I have to quote: `In my opinion, if you cannot write a left-pad, is-positive-integer, or isArray function in 5 minutes flat (including the time you spend Googling), then you don’t actually know how to code.`

You would be surprised of how many developer these days have 'afraid' to write such functions, or how lazy they are, they found this thing and just add to a project, then push to some google list and the project got a lot of followers, and in the next day the project has changed about 90%. I saw this happen over and over again in this ecosystem, this is insane dude.

A lesson I learn is: you _need_ to read every module source code before add to any project, the NPM ecosystem has so many "shits" out there. You cannot trust in any npm module, recently I tried to trust in a module that has more than 5k stars, but I found a such ugly bug on that, that I feel my soul die, and I swear I hear the angels cry, thats not how open source supposed to be.

These days, seems that people dont care about the 'bug free' as long as it work a half way.

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

#682

Post by patates »

nailer wrote: post #585
spion wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promise was clearly necessary, because without it we had hundreds of other less principled ways to implement async control flow :)

We had, and still prefer (looking at npm stats) the async module. Eg: promise.then(function(){}).then(function(){}) is not substantially different than: async.waterfall([function(){}, function(){}]) Promise advocates kept pretending async didn't exist though, and everybody was using callback hell.

You can return the first from a function and it will be a promise. Promises are reusable. Also they contain exceptions in their context. Those can be handled at any point of the promise-chain.

So promises are way more composable than callback based solutions.

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

#683

Post by lorenzhs »

frozenport wrote: post #398

I don't see nobody criticizing 'std::min()'. Perhaps what we really need is a 'std' for js?

`std::min` isn't a library of its own, it's a function in the `` header of the Standard Template Library. The STL also encompasses a wide range of other things. There are some efforts to provide "the missing standard library" for JS, e.g. lodash.

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

#684

Post by loganmhb »

Klathmon wrote: post #602
lmm wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But regardless of how many insults get thrown around, or how many people seem to think JS is useless or that it's a horrible language, its probably my favorite (and I've done professional work in non-trivial applications from C and C++, to Java and go, to python, Ruby, and PHP to BusinessBasic and even some lisp). I see one common thread between all those languages you list: none of them has a decent type system. I…

I've actually played with OCaml a bit, and Haskell a bit less. The problem is that I don't know what "problems to solve" with them, and there is no way I'm going to use something like that at work, so I kind of run out of steam before I really get into it. I might shoot for Scala next time. We don't use Java anywhere at my current job, but I might play around with it in a personal project for a while. I really like t…

If you like Javascript and you want to try a language with a good static type system, you might like Elm (http://elm-lang.org/). As a bonus, it has fantastic documentation and examples of small in-browser projets -- a clock, Pong, and so on.

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

#685

Post by usrusr »

spion wrote: post #587

Its interesting how everyone used this as a chance to attack the small modules approach. This approach definitely has downsides, but the problem caused by leftPad being unpublished wasn't one of them. If jdalton declared a jihad on arrays tomorrow and decided to pull all array related functions from lodash, we would have the exact same problem. If kriskowal decided that Q must mirror built in Promise and published a…

Would people automatically update to the new versions of the libraries you mentioned?

The problem with unpublishing is that it changes an existing version. If instead of depublishing a correctly versioned empty module named leftpad was pushed to npm (increment major, because a non-implementation is incompatible with an implementation), there would not be half as much pain.

As long as unpublishing exists, micromodules increase the "attack surface" to this specific method of changing the contents of a specific published version.

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

#686

Post by calanya »

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…

The alternative to small modules is not no modules at all, it's libraries.

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

#687

Post by cel1ne »

I know the discussion revolves around the amount of dependencies, but I want to add a comment about semver, which has a part in this mess:

In my opinion it will not be done right in 80% of cases.

Every breaking change requires updating the major versions, but developer are hesitating to go from 1.0.0 to 6.0.0 in a month.

The way out is staying in the 0.x range therefore abandoning semver alltogether.

A nice write up about how packages are not following semver in java-land:

http://avandeursen.com/2014/10/09/semantic-versioning-in-mav...

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

#689

Post by blablabla123 »

I guess this is the way one is supposed to use node, preventing one to write non-DRY code. (Golang takes the exact opposite approach, having it's own drawbacks of course.) However, when using React, I kind of trust that the maintainers don't include packages than require 12 star projects, and if, that they fork this stuff themselves.

BTW, isn't that a Facebook project, so aren't they supposed to use a CI? ;P

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

#690

Post by davidgrenier »

wtbob wrote: post #667
minitech wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A module doesn’t solve that kind of type confusion, though. Static typing does. The next best thing in JavaScript is passing consistent types of values to your functions, so just write function isPositiveInteger(x) { return x > 0 && Number.isInteger(x); } and always pass it a number. (Of course, this shouldn’t even be a function, because JavaScript is confused about the definition of “integer” – maybe you really want…

> A module doesn’t solve that kind of type confusion, though. Static typing does. That's the root of all the problems, though, isn't it? JavaScript is just a terrible language. Actually, that's not really fair. It's a great little language for writing late-90s Dynamic HTML, maybe just a little too powerful. And that additional power enables people to build cathedrals of cruft in order to Get Things Done. I don't like…

Only comment worth up-voting I could find.
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