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Micro-libraries anywhere else are everything you said: building blocks that come after a little study of the language and its stdlib and will speed up development of non-trivial programs. In JS and NPM they are a plague, because they promise to be a substitute for competence in basic programming theory, competence in JS, gaps and bad APIs inside JS, and de-facto standards in the programming community like the oldest operating functions in libc. There are a lot of ways for padding a number in JS and a decent dev would keep an own utility library or hell a function to copy-paste for that. But no. npm users are taught to fire and forget, and update everything, no concept of vendoring (that would have made incidents like left-pad, faker and colors less maddening, while vendoring is even bolt in npm and it's very good!). They for years copy-pasted in the wrong window, really, they should copypaste blocks of code and not npm commands. And God helps you if you type out your npm commands because bad actors have bought the trend and made millions of libraries with a hundred different scams waiting for fat fingers. By understanding that JS in the backend is optimizing for reducing cost whatever the price, becoming Smalltalk for the browser and for PHP devs, you would expect some kind of standard to emerge for having a single way to do routine stuff. Instead in JS-world you get TypeScript, and in a future maybe WASM. JS is just doomed. Like, we are doomed if JS isn't, to be honest. |