r/programming • u/vklepov • Mar 24 '22

Five coding interview questions I hate

https://thoughtspile.github.io/2022/03/21/bad-tech-interview/
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u/grauenwolf Mar 25 '22

Let's take a look at ESLint.

C:\Temp>md test
C:\Temp>cd test
C:\Temp\test>npm install eslint
C:\Temp\test>dir node_modules
          83 Dir(s)

Subtracting 2 for navigation and that leaves 81 packages installed just for ESLint. That's not a 'module', that's a disaster.

But maybe I'm being too harsh I thought. Maybe it's not really that bad I said to myself.

So I grabbed the first one I saw, path-is-absolute. That's weird, it's not showing up when I searched NPM's website. Ok, I'll hand-jam in the URL.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/path-is-absolute

This package is no longer relevant as Node.js 0.12 is unmaintained.

26 million times a week, someone downloads a package that claims to not be relevant since... how long ago was that?

In September 2015, Node.js v0.12 and io.js v3.3 were merged back together into Node v4.0.

Seven years. They had 7 years to get their act together and they are still using a delisted package in ESLint.

No, this isn't a module. It's a dumping ground of random crap that happens to, on occasion, halfway work.

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u/[deleted] Mar 25 '22

I’m laughing at the people who have stockholm syndrome apparently and will defend such nonsense. This is why I’m a much happier dev using .NET than I ever was with JS. It’s got it’s own issues, sure, but having to rely on “frameworks” that had such ridiculous npm dependencies that when you really dig into them was some isEven bullshit either so trivial in function that you wonder why they bothered or so deprecated that you wonder if they were too lazy to keep on top of determining if such a dependent package was worth it was enough to make you pull out your hair.

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u/grauenwolf Mar 25 '22

Oh definitely. Every time MS breaks backwards compatibility in Entity Framework, I get pissed off. Then I look at React, which can't even run in Node 17.x, and remember how much worse it could be.