[fieryeagle]

Just sugar-coated kool aid I'm hearing. Community benefits? First of all, I'm coding to get paid and this recent madness proved that JS ecosystem is semi-garbage. Back to the original question - do people really can't program that they need packages like left-pad or is-integer which had their own dependencies? Before writing those cool toolchains (which would likely work in a specific machine with a specific setting with all the real world testing the community has) can we at least pretend that we know the computer science basics?

[usrusr]

People need modules like leftpad to tick the "maintains moderately popular open source project" checkbox. Instant hirability.

I don't want to claim that it would be a directly calculated career move, more like starting a blog: you admire a good blog, you want to be more like the blogger, you start your own one. On the dim chance that it will become both good and not abandoned after the third post. Nanomodules can be just like that, the air guitar of would-be rockstar coders. This is certainly not the only reason for their existence (and even the air-guitar aspect has a positive: low barrier of entry that might lead to more serious contribution), but the discussion would be incomplete if it was ignored.

[spenuke]

Yep, I think this is a huge, HUGE part of it.

Step 1: Create a culture in which "having open source contributions" is a requirement to entering said culture.

Step 2: Remove all friction from introducing open source contributions into the culture.

Step 3: Watch the Cambrian explosion.

Step 4: (Two years later) Point to the Cambrian collapse and how the new hot thing will solve everything.

I don't know what sort of shit show Step 4 will turn into, but it will also definitely be the result of folks taking a simple and good rule of thumb (this time, it won't be "small and composable"), and implementing it without ever stopping to think what problems it solves and doesn't solve.

[fieryeagle]

I would give those candidates the FizzBuzz problem just to see if they can actually code from scratch or `require('fizz-buzz-solver');`. I care more about their competence than what 1 or 10-liner packages they maintain.

On the contrary, I would certainly mark "maintains moderately popular open source project" as a calculated career move, just like how prostitutes would dress up right for the cliente. Sorry for the crude example but I am not placing the blame on the devs here but the absurd notion of employers considering a GitHub repo the 'in' thing before actual capability. Candidate - Brah I got 10 of those packages with 10mil downloads in total but I can't code for shit. Hiring manager - Since we are suckers who look at stats, you're hired!

The problem with this nanomodules approach is that it results in complacent and naive developers that eschew the basics and just publish random crap. Anything can make it to be a NPM package and be judged by...popularity? Since when is code turning into pop music :)?

[johnny22]

if leftpad were in the node stdlib, would you still be making the same point about knowing computer science and using leftpad?

in python: https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/stdtypes.html#str.ljust

[fieryeagle]

Yes, until people stopped publishing isInteger and isArray as `packages`. Plus, stdlib is standard library. Can you cite one for JS? NPM is not.