Hacker News Reader

Comment by domh | Hacker News Reader

These packages are basically memes at this point... Those download figures cannot be accurate for real production usage.

I don't believe any programmer is actually using these. isarray and left-pad are at least functions that didn't used to be in the standard library, to slightly excuse them.

View on HN

Actual programmers do indeed use these packages, and in large numbers. I was in the unfortunate situation a few years ago of hiring a couple of interns (both juniors in a decent CS program) who relied heavily on these types of packages. They honestly thought that it saved them time and they didn’t seem to comprehend the bloat they were adding to otherwise simple code that they could’ve written themselves in 30 seconds. NPM trained a generation of programmers to look for packages rather than learning basic scripts.

It feels like (to me at least) that the pendulum is swinging back the other way. But maybe this is just my preference.

Major libraries used them so yeah the numbers are real, left-pad was in every react and babel install.

I would not bet on that assumption. I have seen some wild code over the years from devs. With 'ai' type coding going on now too you may see them be used even more.

I would've actually thought AI would slightly improve upon this situation. At least in my experience claude seems to write a lot more little utility functions itself rather than reaching for a package from npm to do something. Requiring an `npm install` before getting something working risks triggering a permissions gate.

Opus and fable both are pretty judicious about bringing in dependencies, at least for me. They often argue against and and write even decently large modules to avoid pulling stuff in.

They never install packages for me and love handrolling large amounts of e.g. parsing code where a library exists. I have to keep telling them 'look for a large popular dependency' when they start writing huge functions that obviously already exist.

Was doing something with OSM the other day and Opus basically started reimplementing NetTopologySuite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com