NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? (opens in new tab)

  var passAll = require('101/pass-all')
  var isPositive = require('is-positive')
  var isInteger = require('is-integer')

  module.exports = passAll(isPositive, isInteger)

They've already taken it to an entirely different level of insanity.

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 commitment: more to keep in mind, more to test, more to worry about.

If I can read left-pad's code in 30 seconds, know it's more likely to handle edge cases, and not have to write it myself, I'm happy.

The fault in this left-pad drama is not "people using micro-modules". The fault is in npm itself: all of this drama happened only because npm is mutable. We should focus on fixing that.

NPM/JS has subsumed the class of programmer who would have previously felt at home inside PHPs battery-included ecosystem. Before that, a similar set of devs would have felt at home with Visual Basic. Seriously, go visit the comments section on archived copies of the PHP documentation. You'll find code of a similar nature. If PHP had had a module system 10+ years ago you would have seen this phenomenon then. Instead it was copy and paste.

This isn't elitism, it's just the way it is. The cost of a low barrier to entry in to a software ecosystem is taking in those who don't yet have software engineering experience.

Nobody should be surprised that NPM, which I believe has more packages than any other platform, is 90% garbage. There are only so many problems to solve and so few who can solve them well, in any language. Put 100 programmers in a room, each with 10 years experience, and you'll be lucky to find 1 who has written a good library. Writing libraries is really hard.

a) No standard lib in JS

b) JS is delivered over the internet to web pages in a time sensitive manner ... so we don't want to bundle huge "do everything" libs. Sometimes its convenient to just grab a tiny module that does one thing well. There isn't the same restriction on any other platform

c) Npm makes it really easy to publish/consume modules

d) And because of c) the community is going "all in" with the approach. It's a sort of experiment. I think that's cool ... if the benefits can be reaped, while the pitfalls understood and avoided then JS development will be in an interesting and unique place. Problems like today can help because they highlight the issues, and the community can optimise to avoid them.

Everyone likes to bash the JS community around, we know that. And this sort of snafu gives a good opportunity. But there many JS developers working happily every day with their lots of tiny modules and being hugely productive. These are diverse people from varied technical backgrounds getting stuff done. We're investigating an approach and seeing how far we can take it.

We don't use tiny modules because we're lazy or can't program, we use them because we're interested in a grand experiment of distributing coding effort across the community.

I can't necessarily defend some of the micro modules being cited as ridiculous in this thread, but you can't judge an entire approach by the most extreme examples.

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 implementations of solutions for common tasks.

Lodash includes `padStart` by the way (https://lodash.com/docs#padStart).

That said, I work with Java, Clojure and Python mostly so I may be more used to having a huge standard library to lean on than is typical.

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 circulate the idea that, while it's silly to reinvent the wheel, it's even worse to add unnecessary dependencies.

I think we got to this state because everyone was optimizing js code for load time-- include only what you need, use closure compiler when it matters, etc. For front end development, this makes perfect sense.

Somewhere along the line, front end developers forgot about closure compiler, decided lodash was too big, and decided to do manual tree shaking by breaking code into modules. The close-contact between nodejs and front end javascript resulted in this silly idea transiting out of front-end land and into back-end land.

Long time developers easily recognize the stupidity of this, but since they don't typically work in nodejs projects they weren't around to prevent it from happening.

New developers: listen to your elders. Don't get all defensive about how this promised land of function-as-a-module is hyper-efficient and the be-all end-all of programming efficiency. It's not. Often times, you already know you're handing a string, you don't need to vary the character that you're using for padding and you know how many characters to pad. Write a for loop; it's easy.

Note that this is exactly the sort of question I ask in coding interviews: I expect a candidate to demonstrate their ability to solve a simple problems in a simple manner; I'm not going to ask for a binary search. Separately, I'll ask a candidate to break down a bigger problem into smaller problems. In my experience, a good programmer is someone who finds simple solutions to complex problems.

Note: rails is similarly pushing back against developers that have too many dependencies:

https://www.mikeperham.com/2016/02/09/kill-your-dependencies...

Small modules are not evidence of a problem, and they certainly aren't evidence of an inability to implement these things on the part of the people depending on them. Why would I implement left-pad myself when there is already a well-tested implementation that I can install? Building up an ecosystem of tiny abstractions, bit by bit, iteratively and evolutionarily, is how we get robust, well-designed complex systems. We don't get there by everyone reinventing the left-pad function to sate some misplaced appetite for self-reliance.

The author seems to make some arbitrary distinction between things that are 'large enough' to be packaged and 'pure functions' which are 'too small' to be their own modules, and I just couldn't disagree more. Tiny, pure functions are ideal modules. They facilitate the greatest degree of re-use, most clearly articulate what they ought to be used for, and stateless things are, in general, more composable than stateful things. There is no better unit of re-use than a tiny, pure function.

This is a pretty weak argument. What is "cohesion" and why do we care that modules have it? Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang, has argued the opposite (http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768): that lots of small, individual-function modules are better than a "misc" module that grows endlessly and may overlap with other people's "misc" modules.

Calling a function instead of writing the code yourself doesn't mean you've forgotten how to program! The real problem here is the cost and risks associated with dependencies in general (both of which are actually lower for single-function modules), and the broken package removal policies of npm.

Stringing APIs together is what actually programming is. This is building software and for instance when i use .toString() method I can easily forget how it is done, focus on other high level things and don't care about dependencies, as long as everything works fine.

Let's admit that the main problem here is with broken npm, rather than packages themselves. If someone has written the "leftpad" function, it is so I don't have to write it again, and I can save probably 15-40 min programming and checking some corner cases.

Also please note that javascript can be really tricky down in the details. So if there's anything that can help, it's better that it exists, rather than not.

This discussion about the "isarray" package is probably my favorite: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4bjss2/an_11_l...

Programming, and especially startup programming, is being taken over by people who are primarily technicians rather than engineers. They want to assemble prefab components in standardized ways rather than invent new things. They are plumbers who know how to install from a menu of standard components, rather than civil engineers desigining purpose built one-off aqueducts.

It is the inverse of the "not invented here syndrome." The technician-programmer is trained to minimize time spent thinking about or working on a problem, and to minimize the amount of in-house code that exists. The goal is to seek quick fix solutions in the form of copy/paste from StackOverflow, libraries, and external dependencies to the greatest extent possible.

In house coding should, they believe, ideally be limited to duct-taping together prebuilt 3rd party libraries and services. Those who want to reinvent the wheel are pompous showboating wankers (they believe); creating your own code when you don't absolutely have to is a self-indulgent waste of time for impractical people who just like to show off their hotshot skills and don't care about getting things done. Move fast and break things and all that.

This began with stuff like PHP but really got going with Rails, which preached convention over configuration as a religion, and supplied a standardized framework into which you could easily fit any generic CRUD app that shuttles data between HTML forms and a database (but is painful if you want to deviate from that template in any way.) Note that Rails doesn't use foreign keys and treats the relational database as little more than a glorified persistent hash table.

This set the stage for Node.js (why bother learning more than 1 programming language?) and NoSQL (why bother learning how database schemas work?)

'"The Excel development team will never accept it," he said. "You know their motto? 'Find the dependencies -- and eliminate them.' They'll never go for something with so many dependencies."

In-ter-est-ing. I hadn't known that. I guess that explained why Excel had its own C compiler.'

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html

The entire Javascript ecosystem is a huge catastrophe. It will collapse any time soon. It's complex, fragmented and no one really likes it. There are a dozen different tools to get started. No one even understands how to get started easily. There are no fundamental tools. Everything is changing every week. You can't just build a product and then rebuild it even a month later. Nothing works anymore a month later - your dependencies have changed their APIs, your tools have different flags that do different things, there are new data models that you never needed and shouldn't even care about.

The developers are in high stress. Devops engineers are in even higher stress because they get to see what developers don't.

It's a huge mess and my advice to "prefer core-language solutions to small abstractions to small helper libraries to general libraries to frameworks" (http://bit.ly/1UlQzcH) hasn't been more relevant than today.

Software should be developed using least amount of complexity, dependencies, effort and using fundamental tools that have been and will be here for the next 20 years. Cut those dependencies, you don't need them. They're here today and won't be here tomorrow.

    function leftPad(str, width, pad = ' ') {
      const actualWidth = Math.max(str.length, width);
      return `${pad[0].repeat(actualWidth - str.length)}${str}`;
    }

It also doesn't work on older browsers - both string.repeat and template strings are new. You could fake it with string addition, but addition behaves oddly in the case your arguments are numerical, whereas template strings handle that. There's also a trick where you can say (new Array(desiredLength + 1)).join(' ') to make a string that is the appropriate length, but you've got OBOEs to worry about if you're not paying attention (Array.join puts the character between the elements, so you need an n+1 array for an n-length string). Also, at least on some browsers, Array.join is pretty cruddy, and you really ought to construct the string with an old-fashioned for loop.

Javascript has all kinds of weird corner cases and lots of browser compatibility problems. The fact that someone's written a decent implementation of something that should have been standard in the String object means I don't have to worry about it.

Of course, I do have to worry about stuff like losing access to left-pad when someone throws an npm tantrum, or dealing with future build issues if npm becomes untrustworthy. A cryptographically sound package manager seems like a reasonable want, especially after this week's issues.

But if your take-away from this whole problem is "meh, javascript devs are lazy", you're missing the point.

As a python developer I would never publish a small package, simply due to the overhead of setting up a PIP package.

Spoken like someone who writes functions in 5 minutes that I find bugs in later.

Just because a problem is simple to describe informally doesn't mean it is simple to implement without bugs.

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 do that with software?!?! (of course that ended up with things like CORBA and DCOM, which was all wrong)"

aaaand here we are in a situation where code re-use is actually happening on a wide scale and now you're complainig about that?

28k lines in an empty project? ha, how many lines of code does the preprocessor generate for #include <stdio.h> I haven't actually measured, but I bet it isn't that far off from 28k lines.

Granted, these modules don't do such useful things, but that's the environment their creators were immersed in.

It takes more than two minutes. That little module has a test suite, if you're including it then you have some assurance it does what it says it does. If you write it you've got to worry about whether it works or not.

Seems like a lot of these basic Javascript functions need to be built in to javascript/node itself or consolidated down to a single package of common core functions that extend Javascript. Like padding, is array, etc. As others mentioned, these are fundamental things in other languages.

Yes, these are simple tasks but do we gain anything doing these simple tasks ourselves? I find there is a finite amount of focus I have when programming, and I'd rather spend that solving the bigger problem.

This reminds me of a discussion I overheard between two professors when I was an undergrad. Prof 1 "This new language makes it so much easier to x, y and z" Prof 2 "Yes but what's the point, I can do all these things in Java" Prof 1 "I could do all these things in NAND gates, but I'll get more work done if I have this tool."

I use lodash in almost every javascript project I start, big or small because it makes my life easier.

I'd rather use the lodash isArray than roll my own.

https://lodash.com/docs#isArray

I think it's totally fine. Like other people said, it's the mindset we borrow from Unix, do one thing and do one thing well. The function would be well tested, and could be reusable.

I don't understand why so many people just require lodash into their project (when they start project) while they only use one or only minimum set of the functions. I mean lodash is a very great library with clean and well tested code, but it's also quite bulky like a big utility lib, and for me most of the time I only need one or two of the functions I would just go to npm and find a module just do that thing.

If I can spend half a day writing the code myself, I will -- because I know it will prevent headaches down the road. Yes, yes, I know any code I write adds the probability of bugs down the road. But at least the roadblock would be of my own doing, and not dependent on if/when the package maintainer upgrades their stuff.

Back in the day we would have built up various pieces of library code, which we would have utilised rather than continually guessing best practices. For example, the isArray method cited may be trivial but is also non obvious. We'd probably have something like that in our library of useful snippets.

Sometimes we may have shared the code on forums and the like and people would copy and paste the code, sometimes into their own libraries. We would locate them by browsing known locations or inefficiently querying search engines

Now we utilise a central resource and simple tools to have a global library of code. Instead of searching far and wide we query a handful of tools that effectively does the copying and pasting for us.

How that can be considered a bad thing is beyond me. It's not a question of knowing how to code, it's a question of using your time effectively.

Granted, there is the problem of so-called modules being removed and dependencies breaking. This can be alleviated by vendoring your modules, a simple task with most dependency management tools.

Personally I think that published modules should persistent indefinitely based on the license the code utilises, although I'm not clear on the actual legalities of the recent npm issue (although if it's due to a trademark complaint, I don't see how it would ever be enforceable for completely unrelated code in any slightly sane country).

Maybe we've forgotten how to /just/ program. Everyone bangs the drum so hard of "let github be your resume." Incentivizing putting every brain fart you ever had out into the universe instead of just keeping it to yourself.

Just a thought.

We haven't forgotten how to program. We've got better at it.

If there's a flaw to this debacle, it's that packages can be un-published. That is some grade A+ BS.

But no, there is no such thing as a package too small. Coding is hard. Collaboration should be default-on, not default-off.

The loudest people in the Node community have been evangelizing this practice for as long as I can remember. This shouldn't come as a surprise.

The argument, "If I didn't write it I don't have to think about it" is ludicrous. I just have to point at the left-pad incident disprove the premise of this argument.

The analogy of building things with a bunch of npm lego blocks is laughable. Those responsible for advocating the use of trivial functions by acquiring module dependencies are leading the masses astray.

"But, If I find that there's a bug in a module I can AUTOMATICALLY fix it everywhere!"

No.

You still need to assess how the change to that module impacts any code that depends on it. Just by updating a module and posting a "minor" bug fix can lead to other bugs that RELIED on the behavior as it was originally written.

It's simple, write your own trivial functions. Test them. Maintain them.

P.S.

Another module that can easily be in-lined to every code base you own. (3 million downloads this week).

https://www.npmjs.com/package/escape-string-regexp

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

I even consider PHP a "more sane" language because you at least have most of the useful utility functions in a global namespace and everyone uses them. Of course, the real ideal on this is Python's solution: a nice set of standard libraries that you know are baked in, but most of them you still import explicitly - hence it's pretty easy to write even large Python applications that have a small and comprehensible number of dependencies!

(And more generally: our strike for "more efficiency" in programming is stupid imho! I'd always take a less efficient solution, even "less safe/tested", if it's more "understandable" and "explainable" and sometimes, paradoxically, making things a bit more monolithic and centrally planned makes then orders of magnitude easier to reason about for our tiny ape brains...)

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.

In reality it could take an hour to get this working properly, but it does take only a couple minutes to verify that the solution here is correct. There are certainly good reasons for not adding extra dependencies to your project, but trading a known amount of time to check that an existing project does what you want for an unknown amount of time to redo it yourself is probably not a great bet.

Google, authors of V8 and #1 subject matter experts on V8, have published coding standard. Does someone use it in the node community? No. Everyone loves "standard", a lousy standard that allows everyone put a badge on their github page while still having a code base full of vomit.

JSDoc. A great solution for documentation. You would expect major libraries to adopt it, or a similar thing. But again, no. Major libraries such as busboy do not use them. The documentation resembles a napkin.

Then everything else: input validation, error handling, consistency... etc. Take "request" for instance, one of the most widely used libraries. The state machine it implements is inconsistent. You abort a request and get a timeout, you can abort a request without starting it and get an exception. Issues that will drive you insane while debugging.

Express, one of the most widely used web frameworks on node.js. Do this on a route: setTimeout(function(){ throw new Error(); });. Great, now you have broken out of the error handling context. Great job.

Node libraries suck all across the board. It's the PHP of the 21st century. There are exceptions, like: lodash, bluebird, and others.

    function repeatString(str, len) {
      return Array.apply(null, {
        length: len + 1
      }).join(str).slice(0, len)
    }

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/202605/repeat-string-java...

Now of course there are times you'll want to reach for a library, say for something like an http router, and up until recently the dependency management side of Go has been lacking. But when a pattern or library arises that many find useful the core team is open to pulling that in to the standard library if a strong enough case is made, for example in the context package (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/14660).

1. Make an observation about a popular thing. 2. Blindly extrapolate. 3. Make one or more broad, controversial statements. 4. (Optional) Nuance.

That being said, there is something to be said for using these micropackages. Left padding a string is easy, but you might just have forgotten about that one edge case where in browser X and language Y you have to do things different. It's not really the case here, but things that seem simple at first often turn out to be hard because of some edge cases. One might hope these edge cases are solved if they use a library.

As staid and corporate as it might sound initially, it's a very smart thing to do. One screw-up with licenses could be catastrophic. Are you all really checking that carefully?

I can't even imagine how any sort of proper legal checks could be done with a trillion micro libraries.

Why would you want to install a 500kb dependency that has only one function you need, when you can install a 10kb dependency that has it?

Would you want each of your five 20kb dependencies to re-implement the same 5kb function, increasing the code you must send to the client by 20%, or would it be more optimal for each of those dependency to use the same 5kb function?

The author rants about practices of developers from different programming environment, without experience, without figuring how things came to be. If he did give an effort to think from the perspective from Node.JS developers he’d have addressed the previous two points.

This is like going to a friend’s house and complaining everything is put in the wrong place. It would have been wise to immerse in Node.JS conventions and observe for a while before making comment.

EDIT: Reply to scrollaway:

I've also understated the problem.

Let's look at the problem in the current Node.js environment, it's not uncommon for a web app to have 20 dependencies, each of those have 10, and each of those 10 have 5. That's a total of 20 times 10 times 5 = 1000 dependencies in total.

Let's say you were to remove a 10 line library function that's "standard library-like", used by 15% of those dependencies, and have each of the existing dependencies re-implement that in each of those dependencies that uses it.

15% times 1000 times 10 lines is 1500 lines of code.

So if you're going to troll a solid argument by nitpicking, do it properly and get the details right.

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.

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 version that does this tomorrow, we would again have the exact same problem.

There is only one connection between this problem and the small module approach. As the size of a module decreases, the number of dependencies increases and so does the number of authors that produced your dependencies. With the number of authors increasing, the chances that some author decides to go rouge or protest for some reason also significantly increases.

Therefore, its irresponsible to use this approach with a package manager that allows an old, established module with many dependents to be unpublished so easily by the original author.

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...

npm actively encourages structuring projects as many tiny individual modules and dealing with the resultant dependency trees and deduplication. Both of these things (along with the ease of publication) combine to encourage people to share their packages.

They make it incredibly easy to consume code from other people, but but at the same time provide a similarly low-barrier mechanism to retroactively change published code. That combination seems like a way more deserving topic of criticism than the unending refrain of "developers these days are so lazy".

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...

Maybe the unit of modularity should be a single function and we can do away with modules?

No need to have global dependencies on small snippets that really should be in a core library anyway. C has libc, Java and C# have the creator's (Oracle or Microsoft) standard set of libraries, Python has the "batteries included" stuff in all the different distros. And so on. All of these snippets rightly belong elsewhere, not in packages.

And even if you did get them added to the right libraries, I guarantee you that you will not get rid of the need for a collection of small, and somewhat random, in-house functions, classes and libraries.

Write your own goddamn utility classes, people. Or learn how to suspend package releases, include them in your projects, and smoke test your releases.

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm

I may have just invented a rule for choosing programming language and systems there.

In languages with linkers, the better linkers would discard all unreachable functions. Then came DLLs. Use one function in a DLL/.so, and the whole thing has to be loaded. Go and Rust are usually statically linked, reflecting the fact that pulling in big DLLs was usually a lose. You rarely have two different programs on the same machine using the same DLLs, except for some standard low-level ones such as the C library.

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...

My app might well have an is-positive-integer function but it will include a range of context dependent choices about e.g. floating point, infinities, zero, null, "9", "9 ", "09", boxed numbers, string representations exceeding js max int, etc. etc.

I firmly believe that building on what has already been done allows for much safer code written at a quicker pace. Why should we constantly repeat ourselves? Also by using npm modules we can abstract logic and prevent someone on the team from going in and modifying it for their own use. It is a documented/constant function that we can use knowing exactly what it does. Is it a better world where everyone just copies code out other's repos and then has to include the licence/docs/tests along with it? It's much easier to just pull in the repo which contains everything and make it trivial to see where a function came from.

People are blowing this whole thing way out of proportion just because it makes a good headline "11 lines of code broke node"... You can all try to shame people who build on what's come before and chant "Not invented here" but I'll opt to build on what is proven to work instead of rewriting everything. At the end of the day that's what ships products.

That being said, I think this is a perfect example of where a good concept (small, tightly scoped modules) is applied dogmatically at the cost of the codebase. It's the node.js equivalent of AbstractRequestFactoryFactoryFactory stuff you see in Java, and the Mock Messes you see in Ruby.

Clearly to mitigate such a tightly coupled dependency, Left-Pad should be a micro-service. :-\

Save these for the things you can not do in house, like NaCL. Don't write that yourself.

But string padding, sorry. Any developer worth their salt would laugh at adding a dependency for this. It's irresponsible, and comes across as amateur hour.

This is a simple case of optimizing for responsibility. The inexperienced programmer does not know how to do this, because they have not spent enough time being responsible, and having to deal with the fallout of managing responsibility poorly.

An experienced programmer carefully manages responsibility. A simple function, that is easy to understand, easy to test, and easy to reason about, is something that makes more sense to either pull all the way into your codebase, or write yourself.

Years of doing this means that managing dependencies should never be just slap it into your packaging system and start using the function. If you are on the line for making the wheels turn for a large scale platform that is directly connected to a monetary transaction of some nature, you will quickly find yourself preferring to remain responsible for everything that you possibly can control. There is certainly enough that you can't control to keep you on your toes.

Nothing is included. And that's a feature. The web is not trying to be the kitchen sink. That's iOS. They provide high level APIs for everything. And as a result, the platform is architecturally only as vibrant as Apple can make it.

Now maybe you're happy with Apple, maybe you love the iOS APIs. But if you don't, you're stuck. There's not a rich bed of alternative view layers that you can draw from to build your own vision of how software should work.

Node and the web browser strive to be lowest common denominators. They provide just the very basics: a document format, a very simple programming language, and an http server. The rest is up to you.

That's pretty scary, and so the JavaScript world has dabbled in frameworks. In the end all-inclusive frameworks are antithetical to the spirit I'm talking about, so things trend towards small modules that do one thing pretty well. People go overboard sometimes. I would argue left-pad should just be a copy-pasted snippet rather than module. But that's not a sickness in the community, it's just developers feeling out how far to go.

If you like every application to look the same, and you don't mind being chained to enormous and restrictive standard libraries and frameworks, then you will hate JavaScript. If you like writing software from scratch, forming opinions about all of the different parts of the system, and allowing each application to be built out of different parts, out of the right parts, then you should give JavaScript a closer look.

Yes, downloading a giant JS lib for one function is insane, hence the ton of tiny dependencies.

However, it is equally insane that basic SDK expectations found in every other language has yet to come to be pre-implemented by the JS engine in the web browser itself. Some basic code ought to already be on the localhost the moment your app arrives.

When the developers of such a serious library as React start to depend on a third-party one-function module made by some Dick-from-a-mountain (a russian idiom that means a random person who did nothing significant but tries to show out in all possible means), that means React developers are even more to blame than that Dick-from-a-mountain himself.

If you make any really popular piece of software, you absolutely must have a failover plan. No excuses for not having it.

But what's even sadder is that this issue had spawned a new wave of pseudo-elitist attacks on the entire JS dev community. Calm down guys, things like that could have happened for any language that has a widely-used centralized package system (Perl's CPAN, Python's pip, Ruby's gems etc).

Let me repeat that again: languages don't make software bad, people do. Just don't let such Dicks-from-a-mountain rule over your own modules with elementary stuff like leftpad, and you'll be safe.

Sure there was some argument about Unix philosophy, small module doing one thing and does it very well. Did anyone bother considering the quality of most NPM packages? Quality is not reflected with passed Travis CI or extensive community testing and feedbacks. Not at all. Look at the those packages on apt-get. They are modular and robust. They do what they were supposed to do.

Now take a long hard look at the state of NPM. What do we have? People clamoring for reusability and whatnots. Most of them don't even know what they're talking about, just reciting the latest hip statement from the Internet. Being mature about development means accountability for what you do, not pushing shit around that you don't even have knowledge off. As a self-proclaimed polyglot, I love JavaScript as a language but not the ecosystem. It's like watching a dog chasing its tails:

- Endless loops of discussion that help stroke the egos but not improve anything else.

- Craps for resume/repository padding, not for actual developers to use.

- Bandwagon mentality that just pushes the latest fad along, and the herd towards the cliff.

The notion that JS developers are kids playing grown-up, has been reinforced with this NPM incident. If we want to discard that notion slowly, we need to be more mature developers. It's that simple. Here's what I think we could do: - Have a clear idea on what dependency you need. Browser, IDE, terminal etc are dependencies. Basic type checking is not. - Be better craftsmen. Roll and maintain your own toolboxes. Only share a working hammer, not a broken nail or a wood chip. - Note that for each package you publish, thousands more hours would be spent on learning, adapting, using and reporting mistakes. Collectively, the current community wastes so much time with finding the right things to use. Often times, we learn much more by playing with code, even posting on StackOverflow. That's hands-on, `npm i` is not. - Own the code better. The idea that teams like Babel and React devs with all the brilliant developers choose to put their eggs in a private corp's whims is just scary. You can't hope to build robust software while playing Jenga tower.

I wrote my own left-pad for a project I'm working now and I had to revisit a few times for tiny problems and lack of time to write tests. I would definitely use `left-pad` module if I knew the existence at that time.

Putting on your devops hat, whatever your dependencies, from a reliability and reproducibility point of view, you should control your reliance on unexpected decisions of npm or third-party developers. A lot of the panic with npm issues comes from people blindly using the npm registry and then seeing breakages, with no safety net. I hate to say "I told you so" but this is an issue we worried about a lot when considering Node productionization last year: https://medium.com/@ojoshe/fast-reproducible-node-builds-c02...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350728

* If you're in favor of the micro-module approach, you shouldn't be relying directly on NPM, and should have something like Sinopia in place. After all, external code isn't the only thing you're vendoring, right?

* Micro modules are fine - but your application code should depend on a privately published utils module whose entry point is a prebuilt distribution of all your external micro-modules exposed through a facade. Your utils module deps are all installed as dev dependencies to avoid the Fractal Nightmare.

* Yay, now you have your own 'standard library' which still manages to leverage the NPM philosophy of distributed code. And if some twit decides to throw a tantrum, it will only impact future builds of your custom std lib - and you'll know about it at build time.

My point being, if something is a completely reusable and basic feature, a dependency is totally just. I remember a few years ago when I and all devs I knew (which weren't many, I was maybe 17) had our own libraries to include in all personal projects we made. It contained features we had to look up once and from then on just automated and imported, stuff like password hashing or input checking. This went out of style as single-programmer programs are going out of style, but the little useful features are still there.

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.

It's not that we can't write a left pad function ourselves. It's that we might easily miss an edge case or make a mistake in doing so.

The author seems to be hung up on a preconceived idea of what a package "should" be without actually offering a compelling argument for why a single short function can't be a module.

Yes, every dependency you introduce is a liability. But so is every line of code you write. I'd much rather take the risk on a shared library which can be audited and battle tested by the entire community.

If a function is so easy to write, it's trivial to check out the module's code, review it does the right thing, and then lock the dependency.

It's good to have small packages. Don't forget that the underlying ECMA script is changing so the implementation of these 'libraries' are (or will be) different over time from what they used to be. If somebody finds a faster way to do the method, then it will be done.

Finally, anybody who has used js in the real world understands how many corner cases there are and how difficult it is to make durable methods (i.e. how to know if an array is empty - which requires like 4 different conditions).

Making this about is-positive-integer misses the point that this is a social/political problem not a technical one. A language ecosystem must address concerns of business continuity as first class concerns.

I've got two dependencies besides the basic framework my project is built on: A scheduling engine, and a database interface. I eventually hope to factor out both.

Relying on reimplementation, copy-paste, npm shrinkwrap, or various other ways of importing third-party code into your repository results in the following advantages:

1. You know exactly what goes into your product, and can audit everything for security, performance, or coding standards.

2. You often end up importing less, as third-party modules may have functionality that you don't need but other clients do.

3. You can modify the resulting code to add showstopper functionality, even if upstream doesn't want to.

4. You aren't subject to the whims of someone removing your dependency from the Internet or replacing it with a version that does something you don't want.

Relying on lots of little libraries installed via package manager gives you the following advantages:

1. You can easily install & try out modules that other people have written, letting you test out new features on users more quickly.

2. You can share code with other modules that have the same dependencies, often reducing the overall size of your system. This is important when there's a cost (eg. download size) to your total bundle.

3. You have less code for your engineers to read & maintain.

4. You can easily track licensing & contact information for your dependencies.

5. You automatically get any new features released by your upstream dependencies.

6. You automatically get security updates and performance enhancements released by your upstream dependencies.

The last is nothing to scoff at: imagine if the headline, instead of 'left-pad breaks the Internet!', had been a security vulnerability in left-pad which literally broke the Internet. Imagine how hard that would be to fix if everyone had copy/pasted the code or re-implemented it. This is not an academic scenario either: remember "Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken", published by the guy who wrote the broken binary search implementation in the Java standard libraries?

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...

Always copying your dependencies into your source tree is not the answer to this, no more than always relying on npm modules was the answer to updating your dependencies. They both have pluses and minuses, and if you really want to be a good programmer, you need to weigh both of them. For my projects, I tend to use whatever libraries I need when building them out (via npm, if possible), and then periodically audit the dependencies to make sure I'm still using them and they wouldn't be better off incorporated directly into the project. I wish more products did this, but I don't control what other programmers do.

    npm install <small-dependency> <destination> --save-inline

When I installed a simple lines-of-code counting tool through Macports the other day I accidentally opened the door to dependency hell as gigabytes of not even remotely related stuff started to build [1].

Without a doubt something is going very wrong with Free Software and package managers. On the other hand, never look a gift horse in the mouth so I may not even be the right guy to complain here.

[1] http://pastebin.com/cAZgbaFN

I'm hoping that proper support for ES6 modules to enable tree-shaking bundle builds (in the short term), and HTTP2 with client support for modules (in the long term), will allow us to head towards a world where we converge around a handful of large utility libraries.

In theory, tiny dependencies was supposed to allow us to only include code we actually needed in our bundled code. Bu the reality is that everyone uses different tiny dependencies for solving the same problem. So you end up with enormous bundles made up of different solutions to the same tiny problems.

Professional racers don't need an automatic transmission, but it's quite helpful for an unprofessional driver.

What is it about the node community that triggered this misunderstanding of package management and code reuse?

As for the issue with such a short piece of code being reused by many, why score on number of lines? If it works and is a useful function is more important to me. I am not familiar with bundling within the usage the article covers but we tend to bundle like functions together and the compiler drops unused ones

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

I'm not convinced its worth it compared to the simplicity of commonjs and module.exports. You have to pull in babel, which has over 40k files to do all this.

Why are people destroying the beautiful simplicity that is javascript? Can those people please go back to java?

Every project I've seen that uses npm always required 100s or 1000s of dependencies.

If building or running your project requires something and you can't explain why, I think there's a problem.

On the other hand, there's a lot of bad practices disguised as "simple" and "efficient." Using NPM for one line functions is a great example of this.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/package.json

Small packages done right, well tested = maintenable, reusable, stable code.

The problem does NOT comes from packages. The problem comes from un-publishing public packages and centralized repository server.

I have a java project with a lot of dependencies. Does it mean it's bad ? No, but if maven repos are closing tomorrow, my project will not build as well.

https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=left+pad

https://github.com/nameoverflow/left-pads

Nowadays you use NPM search instead of Google search

The fact is that lazy programmers are lazy. The methods change but the principle remains the same. In 90s people typed in code from magazines and books.

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that packages are not subject to any review process. These dependency chains get out of hand because they are rarely top-of-mind.

leftpad = (str, len, pd = ' ') => Array(len > str.length ? 1+len-str.length : 0).join(pd) + str

WTF are you talking about? Making this into a module?!

  function foo(arr) {
    var str = "";
    var leftpad = require("leftpad");
    for(var i=0; i<arr.length; i++) str += leftpad(arr[i]);
    return str;
  }

The usual complains about many dependencies are mostly void (it's not bloat if you only depend on single functions you actually use).

No... "appropriately sized modules are easy to reason about"

In this case... "Appropriate" has gone out of the window!

The problem is the lack of a test culture.

We haven't. React developers probably have.

First: why small modules are bad. Lots of dependencies complicate your build, and you end up with the dreaded diamond dependency issue. Failures in a dependency become more likely to affect you. It gets you in the habit of using prebuilt modules even if maybe it's not quite what you need and it would have been better to write yourself. With `npm` specifically, we've seen how its mutability can break the build, though that's about `npm` and not the idea necessarily.

I think most software developers' gut responses are that something is wrong and crazy in the npm ecosystem.

That said, there are benefits that this blog post and others aren't mentioning, related to the javascript situation specifically.

The first one is that javascript is a surprisingly difficult language to get right. Sure, the final solution is only a few lines, but which lines are hard. You have to navigate the mindfield that are is V8 in nodejs, v8 in chrome, spidermonkey, chakra, etc. I've had code work in Chrome before but blow up in IE, and it's really hard to track down and test.

The comments in the blog post are illustrative:

One line of code package:

    return toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]';

    (testvar.constructor === Array)

    The constructor comparison will fail if the array comes from a different context (window).

The other thing that people don't bring up, is that there's not much JS standard library, and in the browser context you have to send all your code to the front end.

So maybe you write these 11 lines yourself, and then another package writes these 11 lines, and another... it adds up. But if everyone uses the same package, the code only gets sent once and they all share it.

Lastly, people talk about how `sin` should be a part of a "trigonometry" package and not by itself. Well, again you're faced with sending a bunch of unnecessary code to the frontend. With webpack2 and tree shaking, or e.g. Google's Closure compiler, it can strip out dead code and so this issue will go away in the future, but we're not quite there yet. So package authors still bundle all these things separately.

So pros and cons.

Sure in some ways NPM has packages that don't deserve the title of a package, but isn't the convenience of not having to reinvent every code worth it?

Real developers do not do stuff like this.

"most optimal"?

"Immutability at the centralized authority level and more decentralization of package distribution is the solution, not 'write more functions yourself'."

what the fuck does that mean?? they just don't give up, do they... Fucking retards.

The Programmer's Stone first essay is actual as it never been before.

Actually, it is a common pattern. When some activity becomes popular due to very low barrier to enter it will end up in a such kind of mess. It seems like nowadays everyone is either a programmer or a scientist and researcher.

This is the quality of their software and research.

There has been a reason why good schools taught principles (algorithms and data structures) not particulars (objects and classes). But since MIT and Berkeley dropped Scheme-based courses in favor of "pragmatic" Python (thank god not JavaScript) based courses we are heading to a disaster. Java madness taught us nothing.

History is full of examples where assault by mediocrity ruined the whole branches of philosophy, arts and crafts. Instead we have fastfood, mass media, social media and now this mass coding, which combines worst from mass and social.

Just try to compare things like Smalltalk or Plan9 or R4RS Scheme or Zeta LISP of Symbolics or with this stuff.

But seriously this is stupid. Programming shouldn't be the goal. Just because you can write a function doesn't mean you should. Every line of code you write is overhead that must be tested and maintained. I guarantee that if the author chose to hand roll code instead of using packages he'd have a lot more bugs. But he wouldn't know that until he hit some mundane edge case scenario in production.

Wait -- code reuse is bad now??

  module.exports = leftpad;
   function leftpad (str, len, ch) {
     str = String(str);
     var i = -1;
     if (!ch && ch !== 0) ch = ' ';
     len = len - str.length;
     while (++i < len) {
      str = ch + str;
     }
   return str;
  }

Calculating needed length. Using repeat and just concatenating 2 strings would be faster.

I'd probably get 2 of those wrong in some weird way, but I blame javascript. I mean without Google of course.

Good programmers understand the risks of making your system depend on something you don't have control really well; They know how keeping system complexity low is like an good investment which makes your life later easier (low maintaining costs).

Bad programmers stacks up technical debts such as including unnecessary dependencies until the system no longer works.

"Packages", "modules", "functions", and other words can mean different things within different contexts. Well-known and tested functions are useful. Putting them in a "package" is just a consequence of how node/npm work. There should certainly be a much, much better implementation of code sharing, but sharing and using well-known, singular functions should be exactly what we are going for.

Cracked me up :D

Eventually, given a pure enough language, every "package" could contain only a single function, and every function in a project could be published as an independently reusable unit.