I'm currently in my second semester studying Computer Science, and I'm trying to understand some recent discussions around NPM dependencies that I came across. I noticed that JavaScript developers rely heavily on third-party libraries, and it struck me as odd that for something simple like checking if a value is an array (for example, the isArrayish library), which is only about 10 lines of code, why not just copy and paste that code directly into their projects? It seems like a lot of effort to depend on these libraries. Why is this dependency trend particularly prominent in the JavaScript community, and why don't we see such habits in developers using other programming languages?
2 Answers
This isn't a new issue. A notable example is the left-pad incident from 2016, where a minor package removal caused major issues for countless projects. It makes sense to use packages for small utilities instead of reinventing the wheel, but the JavaScript ecosystem sometimes takes it too far with tiny, niche libraries. It's convenience, but it does seem a bit extreme at times!
The JS community has its quirks. Many developers don't fully grasp best practices due to a lack of guidance from experienced mentors. Plus, JavaScript historically had a poor standard library, leading to a proliferation of little packages designed to solve specific problems. Today, using libraries helps with compatibility across different environments, which is critical given the browser variations.
Exactly! For instance, yeah, Array.isArray() exists now, but older browsers didn't support many features we take for granted today. The plethora of packages emerged partly to fill that gap.