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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?

#71

Post by krisdol »

21 wrote: post #26
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…

I think this is some sort of cargo cult UNIX minimalism - do one thing and one thing only.

For some reason I misread that as "do one thing and do one thing ugly". Either way, it applies.

Lodash does this (and versioning, and clean code, and tests) really well though.

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

#72

Post by rtpg »

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.

Well a bunch of standard libraries have sum defined, right?

JavaScript has suffered from a lack of a standard library for a while. Having a small package like this means that (in theory) everyone is using the same bug free version of summing instead of writing their own.

Honestly having JS start building a standard library at this point would be wonderful.

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

#73

Post by BinaryIdiot »

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…

> Why waste time and lines of code implementing something so trivial when there is already a solution available?

Because it's so trivial? I can't wrap my head around why this is an argument in the first place. It makes no sense to bring in a module from a third party adding yet another dependency and potential point of failure when reimplementing it yourself literally takes as long as it takes to find the module, add it to package.json and run npm install.

People should be trying to limit dependencies where possible. Reproducible builds are really important if it costs you almost no time you should have it in your code base IMO.

People taking the DRY principle to the most extreme degree always makes for the worst code to debug and maintain.

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

#74

Post by jessaustin »

tschellenbach wrote: post #4

In a way this shows what a great job NPM did at making it easy to publish packages. It's so easy that people decide to package up extremely easy functions. As a python developer I would never publish a small package, simply due to the overhead of setting up a PIP package.

Oh God yes. After being spoiled in npm-land for a couple of years, I went back and tried to re-release a very small python module I had written before. I simply couldn't do it. Oh well!

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

#75

Post by ksenzee »

atjoslin wrote: post #11

Counter-argument: A good micro-module removes complexity. It has one simple purpose, is tested, and you can read the code yourself in less than 30 seconds to know what's happening. Take left-pad, for example. Super simple function, 1 minute to write, right? Yes. But check out this PR that fixes an edge case: https://github.com/azer/left-pad/pull/1 The fact of the matter is: every line of code I write myself is a comm…

> every line of code I write myself is a commitment

That's true. However:

Every dependency you add to your project is also a commitment.

When you add a dependency, you're committing to deal with the fallout if the library you're pulling in gets stale, or gets taken over by an incompetent dev, or conflicts with something else you're using, or just plain disappears. 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. That's why so many people are shaking our heads at a 17-line dependency. It's way more risk than it's worth. If you need a better stdlib for your language (some of us write PHP and feel your pain) then find one library that fills in the gaps and use that.

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

#77

Post by jestar_jokin »

emidln wrote: post #19
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…

> 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…

So, in the context of this discussion... you should make use of micro-modules to reduce code duplication, avoid defects, etc. However, don't expect those micro-modules to be maintained or available in the future; so you need to set up your own package cache to be maintained in perpetuity.

Or, you can implement the functionality yourself (or copy/paste if the license allows) and avoid the hassle.

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

#78

Post by sauere »

> There’s a package called isArray that has 880,000 downloads a day, and 18 million downloads in February of 2016. It has 72 dependent NPM packages. Here’s it’s entire 1 line of code: return toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]';

How anyone can deal with JavaScript for more than 5 minutes is absolutely beyond me

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

#79

Post by dozzie »

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 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?

I'll tell you why.

The least important ones is that downloading such trivial module wastes bandwidth and resources in general (now multiply this by several hundred times, because of dependency fractal JS sloshes in). I would also spend much more time searching for such module than I would implementing the damn function.

More important is that you give up the control over any and every bug you could introduce in such trivial function or module. You don't make it less probable to have those bugs (because battle-tested package! except, not so much in JavaScript, or Ruby, for that matter), you just make it much harder to fix them.

And then, dependencies have their own cost later. You actually need a longer project, not a throw-away one, to see this cost. It manifests in much slower bug fixing (make a fix, find the author or maintainer, send him/her an e-mail with the fix, wait for upstream release, vs. make a fix and commit it), it manifests when upstream unexpectedly introduces a bug (especially between you making a change and you running `npm install' on production installation), it manifests when upstream does anything weird to the module, and it manifests in many, many other subtle and annoying ways.

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

#80

Post by joantune »

One can argue that modules are good, but them depending blindly on newer versions like that was bad dependency management.

I say this because I strongly believe that reinventing the wheel is unnecessary and can bring more problems than not.

There are many examples, and I could come up with a made up one, but here's a very real bug that I debugged from another programmer not so long ago:

So, he came up with a JNI for SPSS's C library, applied it correctly, and got haunted for lots of months with an unsolvable bug. The problem? he miswrote the final copy of the file, and sometimes, some bytes where copied twice.

He tried to solve this problem for a long time (and eventually lived with it because SPSS was still resilient to this)

Is this concrete example of a 'module' ridiculously short? yes, but my logic still holds IMO.

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