4 ms·

Why is javascript (seemingly) so much more prone to dependency hell? Is it just the standard library falling short?

williamdclt 6y ago
- Standard lib falling short - No control over the execution env (user's browser), which mean we need polyfills, transpilers, abstractions - Web is everywhere => JS needed for many many things => lots of library for all sorts of stuff => common problems extracted in small libs (which is has good and bad aspects) - Last point exacerbated by JS being a frontend and a backend language - Developpers tend to be more junior in average (not sure that's actually true, it's believable but never seen numbers) - NPM made it painless to add dependencies, so that's what happens
- Sebb767 6y ago
  A bit also stems from the fact that NPM installs dependencies as trees. I.e., if you and two of your dependencies use is-odd, you will have three copies of it laying around, possibly in different version.
  - berkes 6y ago
    And now I'm stuck wondering why anyone ever would need to release a new version of isOdd. Apparently isOdd had 6 releases. Does that mean that the previous 5 times they had "calculating if a number is odd" wrong?
    - Sebb767 6y ago
      Looking at the commit history, they've mostly added checks for edge cases: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/is-odd/commits/master https://github.com/jonschlinkert/is-odd/commits/master Which is, to be fair, exactly the reason you'd use a library like this.
      - berkes 6y ago
        > Which is, to be fair, exactly the reason you'd use a library like this. There is a crucial nuance here: Which is, to be fair, exactly the reason you'd use a library. With which I mean to emphasize that -indeed- libraries are crucial. But nano-libraries, like nano-services are an antipattern. This could be a stdlib (ideally), a bundle (like Lodash) or even a numberUtils. Having a gazillion packages that have a rediculous biolerplate-to-code ratio, contain just one (well evolved!) function and so on, is doing more harm than good. A library "like this" is harmful. If only because it gives people an argument, or just the idea that libraries are stupid and should be avoided.
antoineMoPa 6y ago
Another way to word this is that the Javascript ecosystem is really good at reusing modular code.

- Standard lib falling short - No control over the execution env (user's browser), which mean we need polyfills, transpilers, abstractions - Web is everywhere => JS needed for many many things => lots of library for all sorts of stuff => common problems extracted in small libs (which is has good and bad aspects) - Last point exacerbated by JS being a frontend and a backend language - Developpers tend to be more junior in average (not sure that's actually true, it's believable but never seen numbers) - NPM made it painless to add dependencies, so that's what happens

Sebb767 6y ago
A bit also stems from the fact that NPM installs dependencies as trees. I.e., if you and two of your dependencies use is-odd, you will have three copies of it laying around, possibly in different version.
- berkes 6y ago
  And now I'm stuck wondering why anyone ever would need to release a new version of isOdd. Apparently isOdd had 6 releases. Does that mean that the previous 5 times they had "calculating if a number is odd" wrong?
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    Looking at the commit history, they've mostly added checks for edge cases: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/is-odd/commits/master https://github.com/jonschlinkert/is-odd/commits/master Which is, to be fair, exactly the reason you'd use a library like this.
    - berkes 6y ago
      > Which is, to be fair, exactly the reason you'd use a library like this. There is a crucial nuance here: Which is, to be fair, exactly the reason you'd use a library. With which I mean to emphasize that -indeed- libraries are crucial. But nano-libraries, like nano-services are an antipattern. This could be a stdlib (ideally), a bundle (like Lodash) or even a numberUtils. Having a gazillion packages that have a rediculous biolerplate-to-code ratio, contain just one (well evolved!) function and so on, is doing more harm than good. A library "like this" is harmful. If only because it gives people an argument, or just the idea that libraries are stupid and should be avoided.

antoineMoPa 6y ago

Another way to word this is that the Javascript ecosystem is really good at reusing modular code.