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Left-Pad (2024)

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Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#81

Post by pointlessone »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #68
bartread wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not driven by logic, anger... I don't know that I fully buy this either, at least not the anger part. I can look back on all this with wry amusement nowadays but I remember it being pretty frustrating at the time. It sort of felt like, well, either you knew what the impact of unpublishing all your packages would be and you did it anyway, which makes you kind of antisocial, or you didn't know what the impact would b…

Not to dump on the author, but following the Serenity Prayer would have led to a happier outcome... grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference

He clearly could delete his packages so he did. In the left-pad incident, apparently, the community didn’t have the serenity to accept that.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#82

Post by layer8 »

0xAFFFF wrote: post #26
shellac wrote: post #16

It's a minor thing, but: > Most of my open source work followed Unix philosophy, so the packages did one thing at a time. Nobody has suggested that libc -- to take the most obvious example -- is against the Unix philosophy. Debates occur around whether whether commands / daemons do too much (recent poster child being systemd) or aren't composable.

If anything, the left-pad debacle has shown that NPM package granularity has gone way too small, at a point where package overhead was outweighing the package simplicity benefits.

What does the size or granularity have to do with the incident? If the author had combined all his 350+ packages into one (or had had a more comprehensive text-utils.js package) and pulled that instead, the issue would have been at least as severe?

I don’t think such small packages are sensible, in particular when versioned separately, but I also don’t see how the left-pad debacle has shown that.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#83

Post by baobabKoodaa »

rootlocus wrote: post #77
HPsquared wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11 lines of code! Wow. I had no idea it was that small.

> Most of my open source work followed Unix philosophy, so the packages did one thing at a time. There was 350+ of them. The man page for a unix binary is at least two orders of magnitude larger. At some point, the "Unix philosophy" doesn't make sense anymore. I mean, it couldn't even rightpad.

packages like `left-pad` should really be named more like `resume-pad`

oh look at me, 589 published packages on npm! with 5 700 quadripillion weekly installs!

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#84

Post by balamatom »

bartread wrote: post #52
serf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, Kik turn out to be negligent and pretty scummy. turns out? they threatened a pre-existing naming collision with legal action and bullied the platform first into forcing the name to be theirs, and then afterwards by crying to npm until their software tests passed again. they began scummy.

Yeah, but this also happened to a colleague of mine who created the pug templating package. It's so long ago now that I forget what it was originally called but, basically, he'd chosen a name that infringed somebody else's trademark. I'm not a trademark law expert but the thing about trademarks is they have to be defended or the holder can lose the exclusivity of the mark. So my friend sensibly caved in and changed t…

>pug templating package. It's so long ago now that I forget what it was originally called

jade, iirc. still best html/xml/etc templating package out there, jsx/tsx can't compare

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#85

Post by iLoveOncall »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #73
iLoveOncall wrote: post #49

> Left-pad was like a "death" and "re-birth" moment for me. The part of me passionate about open-source was dead, and something new took over. Now, I'm passionate about business, marketing, running companies / teams Wow, I couldn't think of a worse rebirth.

Because those things don’t align with what you value? Of course.

Yes, I think a passion about marketing can only result in net-negative for humanity.

It's not that I don't value those things, it's that I think they're actively harmful (at least some of them), and that being passionate about them shows very toxic personality traits.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#86

Post by baobabKoodaa »

layer8 wrote: post #82
0xAFFFF wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, the left-pad debacle has shown that NPM package granularity has gone way too small, at a point where package overhead was outweighing the package simplicity benefits.

What does the size or granularity have to do with the incident? If the author had combined all his 350+ packages into one (or had had a more comprehensive text-utils.js package) and pulled that instead, the issue would have been at least as severe? I don’t think such small packages are sensible, in particular when versioned separately, but I also don’t see how the left-pad debacle has shown that.

[flagged]

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#87

Post by yurishimo »

whostolemyhat wrote: post #53
0xAFFFF wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, the left-pad debacle has shown that NPM package granularity has gone way too small, at a point where package overhead was outweighing the package simplicity benefits.

Left-pad was made at a time when tree-shaking wasn't really around, so it was good practice to only include the functions you needed to avoid making websites too heavy. If you just needed a small function then it'd be silly to include a huge utility library like Underscore.

You're missing the point. Nobody with a serious background in software development should ever need to pull in a package to pad a string or check if a number is even or odd. If someone is smart enough to use a package manager, they should be more than capable to write a function to pad a string (assuming the standard library doesn't include one already)!

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#88

Post by nkrisc »

bartread wrote: post #46
nindalf wrote: post #19

> I have to admit that I don't understand half of this blog post It's because you haven't read al-Ghazali yet. (definitely the most pompous and self-important part of this post)

> Not driven by logic, anger... I don't know that I fully buy this either, at least not the anger part. I can look back on all this with wry amusement nowadays but I remember it being pretty frustrating at the time. It sort of felt like, well, either you knew what the impact of unpublishing all your packages would be and you did it anyway, which makes you kind of antisocial, or you didn't know what the impact would b…

What’s anti-social is unilaterally making your code dependent on someone’s package and then getting mad at them when they choose to remove it.

This whole problem was trivially avoidable, and people get mad at him because they were too lazy to avoid it.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#90

Post by anonymars »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #86
layer8 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the size or granularity have to do with the incident? If the author had combined all his 350+ packages into one (or had had a more comprehensive text-utils.js package) and pulled that instead, the issue would have been at least as severe? I don’t think such small packages are sensible, in particular when versioned separately, but I also don’t see how the left-pad debacle has shown that.

[flagged]

Instead of teasing, can you just tell us what the difference is between unpublishing N small packages versus one large package containing the same set of functionality?
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