Take a look at this meme.
The meme is about the JavaScript developers, who use third-party libraries even for simple use-cases (like is-odd). For those of you who don’t know, the second part of the meme, is a screenshot of the is-odd package on NPM.
Is-odd package exports a function, which takes in a number and returns if it's an odd number. Just like the name says. At the time of writing, it has over 38M downloads in total. There is also another package named is-even. It’s the opposite of is-odd. It depends on the is-odd package.
#Who? And why?
When I first heard about these packages, my first question was “why would anyone want to do that?”. My first guess was “just a joke”.
When I dug a little deeper about them, I realized the real reason.
These two packages were created by the same person, Jon Schlinkert, when he was learning how to program. And I guess, he published them to NPM, also for the sake of learning.
A lot of people (including myself), have been making fun of these packages and Jon. Because of that, Jon moved the repositories under a github organization named “i-voted-for-trump”. That’s a good move, Jon.
But, is it really ok to be mocking him? And the packages? I don’t think so. The packages and the creator haven’t done anything wrong here. Only the people who use it.