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I see a lot of criticism to one-line packages, but IMO in the end what matters is the abstraction. Thinking of the package as a black box, if the implementatio

by aylmao 7y ago

I see a lot of criticism to one-line packages, but IMO in the end what matters is the abstraction. Thinking of the package as a black box, if the implementation for left-pad or is-promise was 200 lines would it suddenly be ok for so many other packages to depend on it? Why? The size of the package doesn't make it less bug-prone. I see plenty of people who are over-eager to always be up-to-date, when there really isn't any point to it if your system works well, and so they don't pin their versions. This will break big applications when one-line packages break, but also when when 5000-line packages break. Dependencies are part of your source, don't change it for the sake of changing it, and don't change it without reviewing it.

fludlight 7y ago
It would be more ok if left-pad was part of a package called, say, text-utils which also included right-pad, etc. Same with is-promise, it sounds like it should be a function in a package called type-checker.
jackewiehose 7y ago
> The size of the package doesn't make it less bug-prone. Of course it does. It's more bug-prone just by being a package. More code is more bugs and more build-system annoyance is more terror (=> more bugs). If I only need one line of functionality I will just copy and paste that line into my project instead of dealing with npm or github. > Dependencies are part of your source I agree. If you see news about broken packages like this and you don't just shrug your shoulders your build-system might be shit.