10 useless NPM Package with millions of downloads

funny, know what's even funnier? check out the code for is-even:

'use strict';

var isOdd = require('is-odd');

module.exports = function isEven(i) {
  return !isOdd(i);
};

It's fricking is-odd, negated... And then is-odd depends on is-number, crazy stuff

I mean, i get the meme value in in is-odd/is-even packages, but you got useful packages mixed in here too.

array-includes is a polyfill, first published 7 years ago.
array-flatten is kinda the same. It's not a polyfill, in a technical sense, but Array.prototype.flat is a new feature and the package pre-dates it.

ismobilejs is a device os/type/etc detector. Some apps definitely need that.

And store2 is a wrapper with a huge amount of features, some convenience-based (e.g. modifying currently stored value instead of manually doing get+set), and some unique (e.g. checking how many space is left).

Don't just cheapen the work that went into these packages with a "useless" label, if you simply don't know what's the intended use for them.

While there are some packages here that could be considered useless, I can see a potential use case for them, and most of the time it boils down to functional programming approaches and code readability.

For example:

arr.filter(isOdd)
// instead of
arr.filter(n => n % 2 === 1)

// or

arr.map(upperCase)
// instead of
arr.map(s => s.toUpperCase())

Is it worth installing additional packages only to make the code slightly shorter and more readable? That depends on who you are and what your use case is. Some people will like that idea, others will be left with a sour taste in their mouth. Personally, I'm indifferent but I still wouldn't call the packages useless just because I can't find any use for them.

As others pointed out already, some of these packages are now used as polyfills for older browsers that don't have the said feature. You may not care about IE 11 but there are developers who do. Again, it's entirely subjective but IE 11 still has a userbase - even if it's not that big. There's still a lot of corporations who reinforce using IE for their management systems, for example.

store2 has way too many convenience features to be called "useless". Again, just because you don't find any use for it and you're a 10X developer with a great ego who knows how to reinvent the wheel and implement those features manually, doesn't mean that it's useless. You could think of this package as a superset of localStorage. Would you say TypeScript is useless because JS exists and you can just use JS instead of installing additional dependencies just for the sake of convenience?

ismobilejs is definitely not a useless package. I don't see the point of reinventing the wheel by copying and pasting weird regular expressions from the internet when you can just use what the community already has to offer. This is kinda the point of open source and package-based language ecosystems -- reusability. This package is something I've personally used and I genuinely don't see why you think it's useless.

So yeah, in conclusion: this article is heavily subjective and completely based on what your definition of "useful" is. It doesn't take into consideration any potential use case these packages may have and your only counter-argument is that you can implement them yourself easily - which in itself is not necessarily a good enough counter-argument. I'm surprised lodash or its split packages aren't listed.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that none of these are useless. Take upper-case, for example. I imagine it’s supposed to be useless because we already have toUpperCase(). But sometimes we want to do this:

let upperCaseStrings =
  lowerCaseStrings.map(upperCase);

Whereas this won’t work:

let upperCaseStrings =
  lowerCaseStrings.map(String.prototype.toUpperCase);

Yes, it's easy to implement yourself. In fact, I have (many times). Maybe I'll download upper-case next time instead.

Actually, array-flatten and ismobilejs are not that useless. For example, array-flatten could be a little bit older than the standard Array.prototype.flat, which was not available before 2019.

Begginer JavaScript interview: Find out if the number is odd or even.
Me: Wait let me import is odd

isMobile is not that useless. It's not that trivial to create this function yourself. But the code is just bunch of regex that tests userAgent string. It don't look very reliable. In one of my projects I have very long regex that test if something is mobile or even longer if it's a tablet.

Then i can plan npm package for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division 🤔

What about -? It has almost 23,000 downloads a week. I'm guessing people accidentally do npm i something - D. Next thing to do is make a package called --

I have no idea that such modules exists (and many people installs them).
Crazy

I think most of those downloads are as dependency of other packages... I don't understand why any project would use them, takes more effort to import those then to write they simpler functions. Anyway.... check out you libs before implementing them folks. 😉

A few of these are from the same uber-prolific NPM account (sinderhous or something like that). I have an issue with such ludicrous packages for two reasons - one, it creates so many unnecessary items in the node_module dependency tree, and it seems like a cop-out of learning how to code in the first place.... take the is-odd and is-even packages - anyone who doesn't know how to use the modulus operator has no business coding an application, as that's fairly fundamental stuff.

The big question is of course, WHY?

Most of these packages are probably just Friday afternoon creations, vanity projects with the idea of "let's see how many downloads this sh*t will get" ...

But of course what's baffling is not that these packages exist or were ever created - what's crazy is that there are millions of people downloading this stuff, people with probably close to zero knowledge of Javascript, but who've learned how to google stuff.

Some of those packages are actually valid and were created before a bunch of these features were added natively to js. In my mind only 3 of these packages are useless all the other packages have their place as well as their uses