There’s a bit more nuance as to why. It’s not fair to say that the average JS dev is reaching for a package like is-odd/is-even.

Years ago when npm was just getting started there was a lot of experimentation and land grabbing for packages. A few “prolific” developers were pushing these tiny utilities and then using them in their own projects which ended up being required as deps in other projects and then snowballed into is-odd being included in webpack at some point (I think I have that timeline roughly correct).

It’s still a crappy problem for sure but it’s not fair to paint most JS devs with a brush so broad.

I think a lot of things end up that way, just at different timescales. Best we can do is learn from them and start again, IMO - however that looks.

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions". Still true, probably thousands of years after the sentence was coined.

Yes and the critical issue was tree shaking. Nowadays we have tree shaking so it doesn't matter as much but in the past people preferred small single function packages because they had less impact on the download size.

Everything that touches JavaScript in the corporate world feels broken.

Look at any full stack job post. It’s a mess of tech stack nonsense on the backend for people who are terrified of JavaScript and a layering of framework madness on the frontend for people who are still terrified of JavaScript. So it should be no surprise to see packages like those in common use when people aren’t really writing, or even reading, the real code anyways.

That is just the coding aspect of it. There are many additional challenges to working with a bunch of cowards whose primary job is to pretend to be something they clearly aren’t.

I would've actually thought AI would slightly improve upon this situation. At least in my experience claude seems to write a lot more little utility functions itself rather than reaching for a package from npm to do something. Requiring an `npm install` before getting something working risks triggering a permissions gate.

Major libraries used them so yeah the numbers are real, left-pad was in every react and babel install.

Actual programmers do indeed use these packages, and in large numbers. I was in the unfortunate situation a few years ago of hiring a couple of interns (both juniors in a decent CS program) who relied heavily on these types of packages. They honestly thought that it saved them time and they didn’t seem to comprehend the bloat they were adding to otherwise simple code that they could’ve written themselves in 30 seconds. NPM trained a generation of programmers to look for packages rather than learning basic scripts.

Whenever I see a npmjs project I nope out of it. I’d rather spend $50 on tokens to reimplement whatever JS slop in Python or Go.

I’d say the deciding factor is that it has bugs where both fixing and not fixing them can have a negative impact. If there were no known bugs and there was no harm in using it, I’d probably just leave it there and not disturb anything, given that its use is so widespread, and instead merely note in the documentation that its purpose has become obsolete.

The man released a fix twelve years ago for free. If someone is really depending on this, they can fork it themselves. I'd argue that that's the beauty of open source, rather than a downside.

Others would say pragmatic.

Free software is Free (and free software is free, libre software is libre, …, where the free/Free/libre/OS/… distinctions are relevant). That does not guarantee continued maintenance for decades, and to expect such is the sort of entitlement that puts some people off sharing their work and playthings.

It doesn't say that depending on it was a bad idea, but that depending on it going forward is a bad idea, and they've gone the extra mile and made an announcement including information about what better alternatives are not available.

Would you prefer it just sat there unfixed and unsupported?

Why don't you do it?

We are in the AI era, it doesn't change the fact that investing 1 hrs a month (or even a week) into a long-dead project in a language you no longer use is more investment than 0 hours for the rest of your life.

And yes, if your timeline as a dependency enjoyer is "is this project going to be maintained for 15 years" and you still assumed the answer is yes, it's kind of on you adding a dependency.

Even with AI, the result needs to be reviewed both to make sure it is actually correct in what it intends to do and that it does not have knock-on effects anywhere else. Given the description of the bug I'd think that spinning up the AI and pointing it in the right direction would save no time over just fixing the issue completely by hand.

Fixing the issue could set an expectation in current users of the package that it might get updates going forward, which it obviously won't from this maintainer, potentially reducing any impetus that might exist to move over to something that is a more correct solution these days. Handing over control of the project where it is has risks which are stated in TFA.

So while both fixing and deprecating could have been done, I think the right choice (just mark it as deprecated) has been made. Not fixing the existing bug(s) will not break anything that is using the package any more than it is already broken. If one of the existing issues had potential to be a security issue then I might err more towards fix+deprecate (with big red text included in any announcement of the fix to the effect that this is the last one and future issues won't get resolved upstream).

The cool thing about open source is anyone can fork it and spend their own money asking AI to make a fix.

Reading this threw me back to 2014 - how was working for AOL back then?

It doesn't seem to have gone moldy considering how many people have installed it in recent time.

Sometimes not touching something that works is the best way to keep it working!

There is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix that works.

Replacement is defined in the github repo, in composer you can only define an replacement package, but there is no real replacement, just alternative ways.

Read the linked entry.

Reading this made me really nostalgic. I cut my teeth in web/software dev in the Laravel 5.x days, and it's quite jarring comparing the day-to-day we have now with back then!

+1 on this - Jake's done the best thing with deprecating the package (which shows up locally in tooling and will also be surfaced by static analysis tooling (ie security vendors) based on that, but also archiving the repo indicates it to anyone who lands on the repo

It only kicks in in the presence of a trailing / - perhaps this is rare where the function is commonly used.

Thanks for pointing this out. I used PHP for one of my professional projects and never came through this - maybe because the library was not a part of our codebase.

This article will be very useful for people who might shift back to older PHP versions for compatibility and face it.

Are you from Nebraska?

PHP kept on getting professional attention and development, and so now it also has all those things you mentioned.

PHP makes me so sad.

Along with the numbers, there were a handful of GitHub issues, including one where joining a path onto a URL with a trailing slash strips every letter “a” out of the path.