Littering in the ecosystem

The other day I was in a discussion on the general situation with JavaScript development. I argued that the JavaScript community many time feels like a youth centre, everyone trying to show off themselves and not everyone taking responsibility on what they do. I even expressed that publishing many small NPM packages should be seen as littering the JavaScript ecosystem. Heck, one developer published over 500 packages and this behaviour seems to be encouraged by the community.

Today, I revisited these thoughts and asked myself why I feel this way. What is the problem with having many packages to choose from? Sure, the dependencies your application have each introduce a risk - but the choice of additional dependencies cannot be seen as a risk but a smorgasbord, right? Does my feeling have any reason, or is it just that I am unused to these small modules comparing to Java or Python ecosystems?

Some argue that people seems to have forgotten how to program, that we need help left padding a string. I don’t worry too much about that, using tested and proven code make sense and allows you to focus on adding value to your product or to your client.

After some thinking I reduced my concern down to two issues:

• Discoverability, having many modules sharing the same namespace makes it harder to search for a package that fit you needs. Also, using nonsense or silly package names trying to be unique does not help.
• Maintainability, can one developer with 500 packages really maintain all of those? Just managing PR can be a tedious job. Would it not be better with fewer packages that each have several maintainers?

Think about the value your package brings, does it have to be a package? Does it really motivate a new package or can would it be better off as a module in an existing package? Can it just be a gist or a git repository allowing for people to discover and vendor if needed?

If you publish a package you have the responsibility throughout its life-cycle, allow your potential consumers to distinguish between an abandoned package and a fully functional package that is just feature complete.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that small modules are a good thing, but some of the existing ones are tiny, these should not be individual packages and there are far too many abandoned packages still around, littering the ecosystem.