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> So many people I work with these days are constantly looking for tricks, or secrets, magic tools [...] I mean, that basically explains the utter cesspool tha
by Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> So many people I work with these days are constantly looking for tricks, or secrets, magic tools [...]
I mean, that basically explains the utter cesspool that is the npm ecosystem.
JS/Node programmers don't write code, they just glue together a bunch of libraries and hope it works.
I used to think that the "is-odd" package [0] was a joke, but then I see it has nearly half a million weekly downloads. People are actually using it!
[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd
- morelisp 3y agoShipping bad code fast and with little understanding isn't really what I'm talking about. I would say the kind of frontend developers you're describing lack hubris; the ones I'm talking about (which are all over the stack but I would say somewhat concentrated in the middleware-to-commodity-backend, Spring Boot, etc. area) lack laziness.
- whstl 3y agoThis specific case is just a grift. The usage of is-odd isn't as legitimate as people think. If you look through the dependents, there are other packages by the same author that are "semi-useful" and depend on it. The author got some important packages to use those. The author could just inline is-odd, it's a single line after all, but then he would lose the bragging rights of having a package with 500k weekly downloads. This is how left-pad got included into create-react-app (or something like that) in the past. It was a 3rd or 4th level dependency of something that was actually useful. The problem here is people and packages not really vetting their 3rd-4th level dependencies. And you'll see a lot of people here in HN defending the practice of not caring.