I’ve literally told my coworkers “I’m not saying we should never use dependencies. But every time you add a dependency, you should hate yourself a little bit more. Some self flagellation can’t hurt either.”
So, every time I use a library to recognize patterns on a picture, to interact with Kafka, do some SSL, or do database mapping, I should hate myself, noted
We did Elastic API integration in Java by creating and maintaining huge half-codegenerated transformer from code to Elasticsearch’s JSONs, it was a pain and it was source of more than one error
Dependences should be reviewed and audited to make sure they do what you need and they are worth using. Just making everything in-house gets you nowhere most of the time
Nobody is arguing that you should never depend on anything and create everything yourself, but adding a dependency for literally a one liner function is awful. Like one of the Go proverbs goes, a little copying is better than a little dependency.
You code in Java, of course you should self flagellate on a daily basis just for that. The entire ecosystem is completely fucked.
That is what they were getting at by some self flagellation can’t hurt either. That sometimes “hating yourself” (adding dependencies) is worth it.
I’ve honestly never understood why someone at Google or Mozilla hasn’t decided to write a JavaScript Standard Library.
I’m not opposed to NPM, because dumb shit like this happens everywhere. If such a package is used millions of times a day, perhaps it would make sense to standardise it and have it as part of the fucking browser or node runtime…
I’ve honestly never understood why someone at Google or Mozilla hasn’t decided to write a JavaScript Standard Library.
This picture honestly looks more like C++ than JS, and before you yell at me, JS doesn’t have any standards let alone competing standards so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
JS doesn’t have any standards
ECMAScript would like to have a word with you.
If however by “doesn’t have any standards” you meant it’s willing to sink to new low grounds every day, you would be correct.
someone at Google or Mozilla hasn’t decided to write a JavaScript Standard Library.
Core APIs (including data types like strings, collection types like Map, Set, and arrays), Browser, and DOM APIs are pretty good these days. Much better than they used to be, with more features and consistent behaviour across all major browsers. It’s uncommon to need browser-specific hacks for those any more, except sometimes in Safari which acts weird at times.
The main issue is server-side, and neither Google nor Mozilla have a big interest in server side JS. Google mostly uses Python and Java for their server-side code, and Mozilla mostly uses Rust.
Having said that, there’s definitely some improvements that could be made in client-side JS too.
There’s a js runtime called bun that is 90-something% feature equivalent to node and also has built in alternatives to many packages like express and bcrypt. I haven’t used it myself so I can’t speak to its quality but it’s always nice to see a little competition
So is Deno! You can easily import npm: and node: packages and run typescript without transpiling. With Bun and Deno there’s no reason to use Node tbh.
For starting new projects i absolut agree. At work we have a legacy react app that just will not run on bun and for deno we would probably have to rewrite some stuff.
node now supports stripping types, which is good enough for one-off TS snippet.
(available only in nightly for now)
That’s basically how Javascript gets extended. I put off learning jQuery for so long that all the features I’d want are now standard.
Vanilla JS is pretty good on the client side, but leaves a lot to be desired on the server side in Node.js, even if you include the standard Node.js modules.
For example, there’s no built-in way to connect to a database of any sort, nor is there a way to easily create a basic HTTP REST API - the built in HTTP module is just raw HTTP, with no URL routing, no way to automatically JSON encode responses, no standardized error handling, no middleware layer, etc.
This means that practically every Node.js app imports third-party modules, and they vary wildly in quality. Some are fantastic, some are okay, and some are absolutely horrible yet somehow get millions of downloads per week.
I wish they would replace JavaScript with something that was made for what it’s used for. JavaScript should have died years ago.
Sometimes it’s hard to detach It, specially dealing with web dev.
The browser expects JS, since JS was made for the browser, so you make a front in JS. But now you need a back, and hey, you already have all models and repos in JS, might as well make the back with JS.
It’s a vicious cycle. Honestly, JS is fine for either if you are component enough (ie. not using stuff like “is-number”), don’t get the hate on It.
No, JS is for scripts, it should have never been a whole framework for a frontend. But we can’t get away from it now, because it’s the only thing we have for browsers.
The only two people arguing against the change were both authors/contributors of is-number lol
Note that the PR was later merged by a member who got fed up with his colleagues.
And who hasn’t contributed any code to this particular repo (according to github insights).
Not familiar with this exact team, but a skilled reviewer/issue triager is useful. We can hope this person at least tested the changes.
Another day of being extremely thankful I decided not to learn JavaScript
Sure, but when was the last time you saw, say, a Python project using some third-party library instead of simply calling isnumeric() from the standard library?
There’s a reason for these jokes always being about Javascript.
Python has other stupid problems related to pip. As much as stupid micro-dependencies suck in Javascript, they’re not the shitshow managing dependencies in Python is. It’s an inefficiency that never actually caused me noticeable issues in my former webdev life.
And let’s not talk about C++… People reinvent all sorts of wheels all the time because sharing anything is so annoying.
I only glossed over it… but this looks like it’s trying to check dynamic typing issues? It’s like a statically typed language with extra steps?
Must be pretty good, considering literally every time I check in on the JavaScript community it is somehow more on fire than it was last time. I guess I must have a front row seat to all their misfortune. Either that or they’re just incompetent, but it couldn’t be that, could it?
