the hardest exam question

https://lemmy.ml/post/14710408

the hardest exam question - Lemmy

You’ll find an npm package to help you count up to 2.

(I recently learned - maybe here - that the is-even package has over 170k weekly downloads)

is-even

Return true if the given number is even.. Latest version: 1.0.0, last published: 8 years ago. Start using is-even in your project by running `npm i is-even`. There are 59 other projects in the npm registry using is-even.

npm
What’s even wilder is if you look at the code of that package, all it does is include the is-odd package and then return !is-odd. And the is-odd package isn’t much better, it does some basic checks on the input and then returns n % 2 === 1.
I thought I was missing something. JS is one of my main languages and I always just write the is-odd function myself since it’s like 10 characters. It boggles the mind that is-even has 176k weekly downloads

To be fair having a name can make things easier to read. I get that i % 2 == 0 is a common pattern and most programmers will quickly recognize what is happening. But isEven(i) is just that much easier to grok and leaves that brainpower to work on something else.

But I would never import a package for it. I would just create a local helper for something this trivial.

Exactly what I would do if I had to reuse it, especially now since I know that adding a package would actually add 2. It all just seems so…inefficient
Even if the code isn’t reused adding names to sub-expressions can be very valuable. Often times I introduce new functions or variables even if they are only used once so that I can give them a descriptive name which helps the reader more quickly understand what is happening.
Yeah, I do that with pretty much every separate operation in c# since our solutions are pretty big. Most of my JS scripts are just done in ServiceNow which are separated and named appropriately.