There’s a spectrum of what different programming languages call “modules” and what they use them for, with languages like ML having “true” modules in the concep

There’s a spectrum of what different programming languages call “modules” and what they use them for, with languages like ML having “true” modules in the conceptual sense, where a module is a unit of abstraction, the way that classes and interfaces in many languages are units of abstraction, though when you dig into it, I believe modules are more fundamental and more powerful… then on the other hand you have the situation of, “Programs are collections of text files, people don’t want to put all their code in one file, let’s call a file a module.” Point being, some ways that programming languages use the concept of a module are deep and let you do things you couldn’t otherwise do, some are more dispensable. Then there’s Smalltalk where I believe programs aren’t collections of text files, you actually browse your code in a sort of code browser and it’s stored as runtime objects in a virtual machine image, basically! Then there’s the matter of how code is released and distributed… packaging and libraries. (In practice, the words “module” and “package” are used in overlapping ways by different languages.) Are the single-function modules/packages of NPM a good thing? In practice it doesn’t seem that way. It’s sort of analogous to trying to “giggify” all the jobs. Every individual function outsourced.