We can't exactly search the code to find out what it does, otherwise you'd basically be reading all the code to discover it's true behavior, which negates the usefulness of modules in the first place...
Any search will have to rely on developer-made documentation, and/or meta data. This is great in theory, but documentation is rarely well maintained, and/or someone changes the code but neglects to update the documentation.
This leaves us with the situation we have today. A search that somewhat works kindof, and mostly you rely on googling the feature you need and looking for what seems to be the most popular choice.
I'm not sure how this situation can be made better, especially if we continue down a path of having all these "one-liner" libraries/modules that anyone can make and stick out there into the unsuspecting world. When I need a square root function, and my search returns 800 one-liner modules, how am I supposed to pick one that I know is reasonably well done, and does what it says it will do, without looking under the hood - you'll end up just picking whatever seems to be popular...
In most languages, things as common as square root would be part of a standard library which everyone uses, so there wouldn't be any question. That also means it would obviously be well-tested and vetted, because everyone depends on it.
Perhaps the solution is avoiding one-liners and moving towards more comprehensive libraries, but that doesn't seem to be what npm devs want (not a JavaScript guy so I'm just observing from the outside).
> Any search will have to rely on developer-made documentation, and/or meta data. This is great in theory, but documentation is rarely well maintained, and/or someone changes the code but neglects to update the documentation.
This is why types are better than textual documentation - the system enforces that they're kept up to date.
We could have something similar with full dependent types a la Idris: you could write a proof and search for a function that satisfies it. If such a thing were popular and huge amounts of Idris code were written, you could write only proofs for your program and the Idris system could go download and piece together your program!
That would be very cool, but I'm not sure how much easier it would actually turn out to be. Also to do anything useful you'd probably have to restrict the language to be non-Turing-complete.
Similar idea but what if you were to write your tests first and then upload them to a site that pieces together the required modules to pass them and generates an API against the modules.
We can't exactly search the code to find out what it does, otherwise you'd basically be reading all the code to discover it's true behavior, which negates the usefulness of modules in the first place...
Any search will have to rely on developer-made documentation, and/or meta data. This is great in theory, but documentation is rarely well maintained, and/or someone changes the code but neglects to update the documentation.
This leaves us with the situation we have today. A search that somewhat works kindof, and mostly you rely on googling the feature you need and looking for what seems to be the most popular choice.
I'm not sure how this situation can be made better, especially if we continue down a path of having all these "one-liner" libraries/modules that anyone can make and stick out there into the unsuspecting world. When I need a square root function, and my search returns 800 one-liner modules, how am I supposed to pick one that I know is reasonably well done, and does what it says it will do, without looking under the hood - you'll end up just picking whatever seems to be popular...