While in general I agree with the article I must admit that I also strongly DISAGREE with the overall message. Especially with this:
"Finally, stringing APIs together and calling it programming doesn’t make it programming."
Stringing APIs together is what actually programming is. This is building software and for instance when i use .toString() method I can easily forget how it is done, focus on other high level things and don't care about dependencies, as long as everything works fine.
Let's admit that the main problem here is with broken npm, rather than packages themselves. If someone has written the "leftpad" function, it is so I don't have to write it again, and I can save probably 15-40 min programming and checking some corner cases.
Also please note that javascript can be really tricky down in the details. So if there's anything that can help, it's better that it exists, rather than not.
> Let's admit that the main problem here is with broken npm
It is absurd to have packages suddenly retracted and important parts of the ecosystem stop functioning. This never happened with other languages I have used. Maybe we need a way to make sure the packages are always going to exist. Checksumming and adding the checksum to the version number would be useful too.
That's why there are proposals for immutable and distributed packages managers. Look at gx for instance. This is probably the future for package managers maintained by community.
Stringing APIs together is what actually programming is. This is building software and for instance when i use .toString() method I can easily forget how it is done, focus on other high level things and don't care about dependencies, as long as everything works fine.
Let's admit that the main problem here is with broken npm, rather than packages themselves. If someone has written the "leftpad" function, it is so I don't have to write it again, and I can save probably 15-40 min programming and checking some corner cases.
Also please note that javascript can be really tricky down in the details. So if there's anything that can help, it's better that it exists, rather than not.