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

Post by Confusion » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 12:46 PM UTC

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…

Post by geon » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 12:51 PM UTC

simula67 wrote: post #400

lewisl9029 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes they are, in the same way that a book in which every page consists of a single word is easier to understand than one with more content per page. A more apt metaphor would be separating a book into many small paragraphs that each serves a single purpose makes the book easier to understand. Regardless, the book metaphor misses a lot of the nuance. Of course taking the approach to an extreme would be detrimental.…

> A more apt metaphor would be separating a book into many small paragraphs that each serves a single purpose makes the book easier to understand No, that would not be an apt metaphor for the problem he is describing. > Regardless, the book metaphor misses a lot of the nuance. Not if you are trying to understand the point he is trying to make. Is there any cost to creating modules, uploading them to npm and using the…

Post by deong » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 12:56 PM UTC

lewisl9029 wrote: post #408

simula67 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A more apt metaphor would be separating a book into many small paragraphs that each serves a single purpose makes the book easier to understand No, that would not be an apt metaphor for the problem he is describing. > Regardless, the book metaphor misses a lot of the nuance. Not if you are trying to understand the point he is trying to make. Is there any cost to creating modules, uploading them to npm and using the…

> No, that would not be an apt metaphor for the problem he is describing. That's because I don't agree that the problem he is describing exists, or at least not to the degree he's describing, which was full of hyperbole. > Is there any cost to creating modules, uploading them to npm and using them in other projects ? Clearly there is, as is shown by the world-wide breakage from yesterday. This is probably only one of…

    function leftpad(str, len, ch) {
        // NPM won't let me delete modules, so here you go
        return "";
    }

Post by talideon » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

minitech wrote: post #547

ShellfishMeme wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS does not have an Integer type, so (x > 0) does not work. Now if you add all those checks necessary to see whether you're actually dealing with an integer here, you get to a point where you cannot be sure anymore whether there aren't any weird type coercion issues there and need to start writing tests. Suddenly your whole positive integer check took 1h to write and you still cannot be sure whether there's something…

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…

    return Number.isInteger(x) && x > 0;

Post by ctolsen » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:04 PM UTC

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…