Comment by junon
5 hours ago
I feel like I have to remind people of this quite often, but the history is such that npm was lightweight at one point, bundling wasn't a thing, and while `isodd`/`iseven` are of course silly, things like `isarray` were not functions that existed back then (we didn't have Array.isArray). `typeof [] === 'object'` in JS, so e.g. my package `is-arrayish` checked for a similar structure to an array (whereas Id guess `isarray` checked for the prototype). `isarray` failed for the `arguments` keyword, which was needed for variadics before argument spreads were added to the language I believe in ES5.
So of course they don't make sense now. But they were created for a reason. Before even Markov chains were a fad - let alone LLMs - we were trying to be as efficient as possible and maximize code reuse I stead of writing the same helper functions over and over again. That's what you're seeing.
Additional Context: for about two years functional programming was REALLY popular in the Node community. It was a fad to chain tons of tiny functions together, and thus lots of people wrote tons of tiny functions. This is why lodash/fp exists.
Yes and the critical issue was tree shaking. Nowadays we have tree shaking so it doesn't matter as much but in the past people preferred small single function packages because they had less impact on the download size.
I don’t think it ever made sense. Code reuse improves efficiency when the code can be shared in memory, or when it needs to be updated and you only have to change it in one place. JS packages don’t give you sharing beyond what you’d get from copying the code. And these little things don’t need to be updated, and in fact you probably don’t want them to be.
It’s a case of doing something without understanding why it’s done. Packages are good, code sharing is good, so use it for everything. But it misses why they’re good.
I hate to bring politics into such discussions, but this thought struck me as funny.
The hubris of humanity... what you're describing is akin to the US Constitution and the Founding Father's goals, ending in Donald Trump.
Node is the same horror.
Nice ideas, great premise, and all turned to garbage in the end.
"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions". Still true, probably thousands of years after the sentence was coined.
I think a lot of things end up that way, just at different timescales. Best we can do is learn from them and start again, IMO - however that looks.