NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? • Hacker News Board

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

#731

Post by Estragon » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:37 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #305

ktRolster wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to keep writing stuff in JS, and I'm going to keep loving it. Why do you like it? Serious question.

I'm very hesitant to answer this, as i know it will bring on angry comments and people telling me i'm wrong, but i'll give it a shot (this is all literally off the top of my head right now, so if you are going to poke holes in it, cut me some slack) This got a lot bigger than i thought, so strap in! * The lack of "private" anything. This sounds like a bad idea, but I firmly believe it was a major reason for JS's succ…

  >  I can use multiple debuggers

What does this look like, and how does it improve the experience over using a single debugger?

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

#732

Post by nailer » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:40 PM UTC

rantanplan wrote: post #729

nailer wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing your own solution, when you could use a common widely known solution, exactly matches both writing your own left pad and inventing your own wheel. > By the JS community's standards if I wanted code to capitalize the 3rd or sometimes 4th letters of a string, they would be 2 different npm modules. If there was, it would have been published and people would be depending on it. Instead, people use the stdlib firs…

A 1-line of code module matches your needs exactly just for today . When you have 100 such modules which don't quite work and don't quite need after a month(quite a long time for a JS project to exist untouched), then your dependency hell shows its ugly head. If you had years of experience in a wide array of technologies and languages, you'd be aware of that which is, and has been, obvious to the rest of us for the p…

> A 1-line of code module matches your needs exactly just for today.

Nothing about function length determines utility. There are many one lines that match many people's needs repeatedly.

> When you have 100 such modules which don't quite work

This is worrying. How are you picking the modules you use? 100x popular modules from npm - with git repos, unit tests, READMEs, and hundreds of other users - beat 100x functions implemented in-house for NIH (or more likely, 100x functions copy pasted from Stack Overflow).

> If you had years of experience in a wide array of technologies and languages

Please don't assume things about other people. It's very rude, and it makes you look bad when you're wrong.

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

#733

Post by brentburgoyne » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:40 PM UTC

ucho wrote: post #550

brentburgoyne wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

five.js was missing something. I fixed it. https://github.com/jackdcrawford/five/pull/234

Did you add dist/five.js to commit by mistake?

Nope, that was on purpose.

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

#734

Post by grav » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:40 PM UTC

Isn't the problem that there is a lack of a good standard library in Javascript?

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

#735

Post by coleifer » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:43 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…

> author of over 600 modules on npm

Nope.

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

#736

Post by geetee » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:43 PM UTC

deong wrote: post #705

lewisl9029 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This was a failure on npm's side by including a functionality that allows users to trivially remove packages from a package management system that is used by hundreds of other packages, something that most major package management systems have decided was a bad idea. That is emphatically not the problem. The author of those modules could have just as easily modified the code instead of deleting it: function leftpad…

You can't republish with the same version number, so you would be protected if you're pinned to a specific release.

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

#737

Post by kungtotte » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

omgtehlion wrote: post #493

terryf wrote: post #488

So, apparently some guys managed to build a system where it is very easy to re-use small parts of other people's code and now the author is complaining that "too much code re-use is happening" ? I'm fairly old, so I remember the complaints a decade or two ago that people had where "We can compose hardware from IC's and you don't have to know what's going on inside and it's all standard and just works! Why can we not…

minor nitpick: it's not 28k lines, it is 28k FILES

Which, given what I understand about most packages on npm, corresponds closely to 28k lines :P

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

#738

Post by kerkeslager » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

A lot of the discussion here really isn't talking about the problem at hand.

From the perspective of Babelify users, a major bug was introduced into software they depended on. I don't know how much money in developer time was lost due to this but it would almost certainly be in the thousands of dollars.

And it could have been a lot worse. It could have been something more complicated than left-pad. The author could have introduced a vulnerability or outright malicious code, or been hacked and done the same, and millions of people would have downloaded it and run it.

Arguably, small modules are good if you control them. Maybe they are more composable, maybe they enable better testing, maybe they encourage code reuse. I am not going to argue for our against small modules.

But none of the positives of small modules matter if an unknown developer who you have no reason to trust can change or unpublish the module out from under you. It's irresponsible as developers to risk our employers' and clients' businesses in this way for a function we could write in five minutes.

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

#739

Post by Klathmon » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:47 PM UTC

Estragon wrote: post #731

Klathmon wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very hesitant to answer this, as i know it will bring on angry comments and people telling me i'm wrong, but i'll give it a shot (this is all literally off the top of my head right now, so if you are going to poke holes in it, cut me some slack) This got a lot bigger than i thought, so strap in! * The lack of "private" anything. This sounds like a bad idea, but I firmly believe it was a major reason for JS's succ…

> I can use multiple debuggers What does this look like, and how does it improve the experience over using a single debugger?

I meant that more that I have multiple options to choose from.

Multiple browsers means there are multiple competing sets of debugging tools, each are good at some things and worse at others. For example, Firefox was among the first to be able to properly debug promises, while chrome still let it swallow unhandled errors.

After writing that, i think the reason i love working with JS is because of the choice. A lot of that choice isn't necessarily because of the language (you could easily have that debugging experience in other languages), but it's currently in javascript.

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

#740

Post by Estragon » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 1:47 PM UTC

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…

If it was a good implementation, I'd agree with you, but it's not: https://github.com/azer/left-pad/pulls