Comment by SchemaLoad

8 hours ago

The best outcome was things like jquery and then lodash where a whole collection of small util functions get rolled in to one package.

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SchemaLoad

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josephg  5 hours ago

Oh god, without tree shaking, lodash is such a blight.

I've seen so many tiny packages pull in lodash for some little utility method so many times. 400 bytes of source code becomes 70kb in an instant, all because someone doesn't know how to filter items in an array. And I've also seen plenty of projects which somehow include multiple copies of lodash in their dependency tree.

Its such a common junior move. Ugh.

Experienced engineers know how to pull in just what they need from lodash. But ... most experienced engineers I know & work with don't bother with it. Javascript includes almost everything you need these days anyway. And when it doesn't, the kind of helper functions lodash provides are usually about 4 lines of code to write yourself. Much better to do that manually rather than pull in some 70kb dependency.

  • miki123211  28 minutes ago

    The problem with helper functions is that they're often very easy to write, but very hard to figure out the types for.

    Take a generic function that recursively converts snake_case object keys to pascalCase. That's about 10 lines of Javascript, you can write that in 2 mins if you're a competent dev. Figuring out the types for it can be done, but you really need a lot of ts expertise to pull it off.

  • SchemaLoad  3 hours ago

    I agree the JS standard library includes most of the stuff you need these days, rendering jquery and half of lodash irrelevant now. But there's still a lot of useful utilities in lodash, and potentially a new project could curate a collection of new, still relevant utilities.