If you think is-number can be replaced with a one-liner, you don’t have the enterprise code mindset. What if the world gets more inclusive and MMXXIV, ½ and ⠼⠁ become recognized as numbers? 𒐍𓆾 were numbers in the past but what if people start assigning numeric value to other characters? Are 🖐🔟💯🆢🂵🀌🁅 numbers of the future???
/s
I’m not even all kidding, Regex implementations are split on whether “٣” matches d.
You may argue that writiing 2024 as “MMXXIV” and not “ⅯⅯⅩⅩⅣ” is a mistake but while typists who’d use “2OlO” for “2010” (because they grew up using cost-reduced typewriters) are dying out, you’ll never get everyone to use the appropriate Unicode for Roman numerals.
Even if they did use unicode, any codeset , glyph or language changes over time , ulimately they emerge out of communication, not the other way round.
If some culture decides they want to use the glyph “2” to mean a word “to”, they can and will, and no codeset is going to stop them. And if they get their message to their intended audience it doesnt matter that somebody else’s isnumber fuction get’s it wrong.
A person, community or standard codeset or dictionary cannot deny the accuracy or content of encrypted communication just because they can’t decipher it.
Put another way a more robust isnumber() should maybe have a second argument to specify the codeset being used, and maybe whether written words - in some defined languare - are also to be converted
Excel is going to have a Date with you, and it’s not asking further questions. If you didn’t wish to consent to have your col’n shattered, you should have preceded it with a '.
yeah, I’ve been rohypnolled by both microsoft and oracle, and general cloud shit , and various co workwers so many times now i barely even notice.
Hilariosly excel has recently started asking now, I think it says something like: “I’ve just fucked up several columns in your csv that you went to the bother of enquoting.” “Do you want me to reload it and i’ll try to un-fuck a few of those columns? ( whispers to audience - but probably not all of them - tee hee).”
I think my employer just needs to employ 25-50 more “delivery” managers and empower them to spend millions on a prettier barrel for us to bend over, that’ll solve it. Maybe it’ll have flufffy handcuffs.
So the only valid digits are arabic numbers but arabic script numbers are not a valid digit? If we want programming to be inclusive then doesn’t that make sense to also include the arabic script number?
So the only valid digits are arabic numbers but arabic script numbers are not a valid digit?
Some people writing Regex implementations have that opinion. I’ve refrained from saying mine.
If we want programming to be inclusive then doesn’t that make sense to also include the arabic script number?
Maybe. IMO, number tests should be chosen/implemented based on the project’s requirements. If you want to include every Unicode character or string pattern anyone’s ever used to convey a numeric value, that would be a long and growing list. Arguably, it’s impossible: the word “elf” means a number if interpreted as German for “eleven” but not if interpreted as English for 🧝.
Yeah, but “elf” are not digits. Digits are a symbol abstracted from the language itself. Does 5 and V convey different meanings in the context of digits? And yeah, I can see why they would argue about the implementation because inclusivity is important. Especially when designing a language implementation. If you are designing it wrong, it will be very hard to extend it in the future. But for application level implementation, go nuts.
As I said, a digit is a symbol. Much like how we use letters to compose words, digits are used to construct numbers. When you start to repeat or reuse the symbol then it is no longer a singular symbol (what regex \d does). Hence my comments on why arabic script are one of the understandable debates since i18n is a valid concern as much as a11y is.
You are right, “elf” is a stretch, it does not make sense to parse it as a number. But in some languages, the string “15 240,5” is just how a number is written (yes, that’s a U+2009 THIN SPACE, you can’t stop me from using it as a thousand separator in German). Obviously, despite having a , on their numpads, German programmers still expect computers to parse numbers with decimal dots and interpret commas as list values.
Alright, maybe you misunderstood the term digits with numbers. When parsing a digit, you do not attach semantic yet to the building blocks. A \d regex parser does not care that the string “555” is not equivalent to “VVV”. All it cares about is that there is the digit “5” or “V”. In the same vein, regex parser should not try to parse IV as a single symbol.
It’s not just digits. Nobody is expecting it to understand language yet but the parser is-number still returns true for “2e3” or “0x0F”. It tells you whether the string can be interpreted as a real numeric value.
Yeah, hence is-“number”. But we were talking about regex are we. A number representation can use digits but it can also not. Much like how you make a number using the word “elf”.
Lisp code is already like this. That’s why I keep trying to explain it to programmers. Try reading the book SICP, published decades ago by MIT computer researchers.
All junior devs should read OCs comment and really think about this.
The issue is whether is_number() is performing a semantic language matter or checking whether the text input can be converted by the program to a number type.
The former case - the semantic language test - is useful for chat based interactions, analysis of text (and ancient text - I love the cuneiform btw) and similar. In this mode, some applications don’t even have to be able to convert the text into eg binary (a ‘gazillion’ of something is quantifying it, but vaguely)
The latter case (validating input) is useful where the input is controlled and users are supposed to enter numbers using a limited part of a standard keyboard. Clay tablets and triangular sticks are strictly excluded from this interface.
Another example might be is_address(). Which of these are addresses? ‘10 Downing Street, London’, ‘193.168.1.1’, ‘Gettysberg’, ‘Sir/Madam’.
To me this highlights that code is a lot less reusable between different projects/apps than it at first appears.
It’s kind of insane how bad this whole is-number thing is. It’s designed to tell you if a string is numeric, but I would argue if you’re ever using that you have a fundamental design problem. I hate dynamic typing as much as anyone else, but if forced to use it I would at least try to have some resemblance of sanity by just normalizing it to an actual number first.
Because of the insanity of keeping them strings and only attempting to validate them (poorly) up front you open yourself up to a suite of bugs. For example, it took me all of 5 minutes to find this bug:
<span style="color:#323232;">toRegexRange(</span><span style="color:#183691;">'+1'</span><span style="color:#323232;">, </span><span style="color:#183691;">'+2'</span><span style="color:#323232;">)
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">// returns "(?:+1|+2)" which is not valid regexp
</span>
The problem is the underlying API. parseInt(“550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000”, 10) (this is a UUID) returns 550. If you’re expecting that input to not parse as a number, then JavaScript fails you. To some degree there is a need for things to provide common standards. If your team all understands how parseInt works and agrees that those strings should be numbers and continues to design for that, you’re golden.
Yeah good point. I suppose the problem is this function that operates on numbers allows numeric strings to be passed in in the first place. The only place where I would really expect numeric strings to exist is captured directly from user input which is where the parsing into a numeric data type should happen, not randomly in a library function.
is-number is a project by John Schlinkert. John has a background in sales and marketing before he became an open source programmer and started creating these types of single function packages. So far he has about 1400 projects. Not all of them are this small, though many are.
He builds a lot of very basic functionality packages. Get the first n values from an array. Sort an array. Set a non-enumerable property on an object. Split a string. Get the length of the longest item in an array. Check if a path ends with some string. It goes on and on.
If you browse through it’s not uncommon to find packages that do nothing but call another package of his. For example, is-valid-path provides a function to check if a windows path contains any invalid characters. The only thing it does is import and call another package, is-invalid-path, and inverses its output.
He has a package called alphabet that only exports an array with all the letters of the alphabet. There’s a package that provides a list of phrases that could mean “yes.” He has a package (ansi-wrap) to wrap text in ANSI color escape codes, then he has separate packages to wrap text in every color name (ansi-red, ansi-cyan, etc).
To me, 1400 projects is just an insane number, and it’s only possible because they are all so trivial. To me, it very much looks like the work of someone who cares a lot about pumping up his numbers and looking impressive. However the JavaScript world also extolled the virtues of these types of micro packages at some point so what do I know.
And anyone who has been around for a while should remember when left-pad broke node.js. Including unnecessary dependencies, instead of writing trivial code is just bad practice.
To me, 1400 projects is just an insane number, and it’s only possible because they are all so trivial.
Holy shit. I’m going to have to go through my team’s dependencies. I don’t feel confident that someone “maintaining” that many projects is going to be able to keep all bad actors at bay. Not to mention, none of the examples of his libraries that I’ve seen SHOULD be libraries.
I’ve literally told my coworkers “I’m not saying we should never use dependencies. But every time you add a dependency, you should hate yourself a little bit more. Some self flagellation can’t hurt either.”
So, every time I use a library to recognize patterns on a picture, to interact with Kafka, do some SSL, or do database mapping, I should hate myself, noted
We did Elastic API integration in Java by creating and maintaining huge half-codegenerated transformer from code to Elasticsearch’s JSONs, it was a pain and it was source of more than one error
Dependences should be reviewed and audited to make sure they do what you need and they are worth using. Just making everything in-house gets you nowhere most of the time
Nobody is arguing that you should never depend on anything and create everything yourself, but adding a dependency for literally a one liner function is awful. Like one of the Go proverbs goes, a little copying is better than a little dependency.
I don’t think typescript exists because JavaScript wasn’t designed to be statically typed. I think Typescript exists because JavaScript wasn’t really designed, period.
Sure, but when was the last time you saw, say, a Python project using some third-party library instead of simply calling isnumeric() from the standard library?
There’s a reason for these jokes always being about Javascript.
Python has other stupid problems related to pip. As much as stupid micro-dependencies suck in Javascript, they’re not the shitshow managing dependencies in Python is. It’s an inefficiency that never actually caused me noticeable issues in my former webdev life.
And let’s not talk about C++… People reinvent all sorts of wheels all the time because sharing anything is so annoying.
I know it is, and I find it to be a pretty ridiculously complex fix for a self-inflicted wound.
The disruption it’s caused me outweighs by far any minor inconvenience with the multiplication or micro packages in the NodeJS world. There’s that, and the Python 2 vs 3 shitshow from which the world still hasn’t fully recovered from yet.
I mean it: Python has no business laughing at Javascript. Get your act together, snek 😜
Don’t worry, people make plenty of jokes about C++ too.
Hell, people joke about my favourite language too - Cargo build times are a meme unto themselves.
I don’t think there’s a truly great dependency management system there. Though all in all, I’ve generally had no MAJOR issues with Cargo, Maven or Gradle.
Must be pretty good, considering literally every time I check in on the JavaScript community it is somehow more on fire than it was last time. I guess I must have a front row seat to all their misfortune. Either that or they’re just incompetent, but it couldn’t be that, could it?
These are both made by the same person from this PR (who also made both the package the PR is on, and the is-number package that is being removed as a dep)
I don’t get the concept that depending on 7 lines of code from a third-party package is remotely acceptable. It’s expanding the potential attack surface to save a dev from templating 7 lines of boilerplate. There’s no net benefit or appreciable time saved.
I’m glad I don’t have to deal with this regularly.
ETA: The package is even MIT licensed! There’s no excuse but laziness and not wanting to understand the code to import this rather than inlining or implementing a novel version. If I can spend the time to write:
is-number is a one-line function. (though it’s debatable if a function that complex should be compressed to one line)
You may have heard of a similar if more extreme “microdependency” called is-even. When you use an NPM package, you also need all the dependencies of that package, and the dependencies of those dependencies recursively. Each package has some overhead, eventually leading to this moment in time.
Web bloat in a nutshell and why we need to switch to things like Web Assembly more than ever. It’s not WASM, but I used Laminar which is a Scala.js library, and it’s the absolute pinnacle of (frontend) web development. Scala in general is just really great for idiomatic web code, its flexibility is unbeatable.
Another amazing alternative would be anything Rust. In fact I’ve used that much more than Scala for web. I’ve mainly used Leptos for full-stack and and Actix for backend, but I’ve seen Dioxus and Axum in good use and they both seem really great too.
Apparently Lemmy uses Leptos for its UI so… that’s a +1.
I’m not sure, this is a valid estimate. If they were to replace is-number with its contents, that would mean that the economy is only in HTTP-related overhead.
It maybe will make difference because of building phase, lock-files, package-files, but I am not sure that data-traffic difference is that big
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