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procaryote | on: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat
The most frustrating thing with the "Atomic architecture" bit with tiny packages is how obviously stupid it is. Any borderline sane person should look at isOdd/isEven and see that it's an awful idea

Instead they've elevated it to a cultural pillar and think they've come up with a great innovation. It's like talking to antivaxers

RadiozRadioz | parent | next
It's because it has a smart-sounding name. Some people are shallow and performative; some nice-looking blog post says they can have "atomic architecture", then the trend starts and everybody wants to show how enlightened they are.
whstl | root | parent | next
It's not just the name or the smart explanation.

Atomic packages brings more money to the creators.

If you have two useful packages it's hard to ask for money, even if they're used by Babel or some popular React dependency.

If you have 900 packages that are transitive dependencies the same couple deps above, it's way easier to get sponsorship. This is a way to advertise themselves: "I maintain 1000 packages".

The first guy that did this in a not-nice way was a marketing/salesperson and has mentioned that they did on purpose to launch their dev career.

TLDR: This is just some weird ass pyramid thing to get Github sponsors or clout.

williamcotton | root | parent
That’s not how we started down this path. See snark-free sibling comment from padjo.
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{"deleted":true,"id":47475896,"parent":47475722,"time":1774172822,"type":"comment"}
RadiozRadioz | root | parent
Both my claim and theirs are unsupported by evidence, therefore they are equally valid.
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padjo | parent | next
The philosophy was kinda refreshing in the early days. There was a really low barrier to publishing and people were encouraged to build and share tools rather than hoard things. It was probably somewhat responsible for the success of npm and the node ecosystem, especially given the paltry standard lib.

Of course, like most things, when taken to an extreme it becomes absurd and you end up with isOdd.

egeozcan | root | parent
I think the issue is that the JavaScript ecosystem is so large that even the strangest extremes manage to survive. Even if they resonate with just 0.1% of developers, that’s still a lot of developers.

The added problem with the atomic approach is that it makes it very easy for these fringes to spread throughout the ecosystem. Mostly through carelessness, and transitive dependencies.

IsTom | parent | next
I've seen some juniors writing risoni code like that. They've heard that you shouldn't write big functions, so obviously they forcefully split things until they can't be split anymore.
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