How One Programmer Broke the Internet By Deleting a Tiny Piece of Code
getpocket.com
A man in Oakland, California, disrupted web development around the world in 2016 by deleting 11 lines of code.
    • @xor@infosec.pubEnglish
      7•5 months ago

      you should see the “is_odd” package…

      it’s like, return (num%2)? true:false

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
        11•5 months ago

        People using this deserve that their code breaks. Absolutely ridiculous.

        Neither this, nor the leftpad thing, nor this is-even “package” are things I would even think about for a second before just writing it on my own. I wouldn’t even consider those features (let alone packages to depend my code on!) but basic programming.

        • EpheraEnglish
          8•5 months ago

          Problem is when you accidentally pull it in as a transitive dependency…

        • @xor@infosec.pubEnglish
          4•5 months ago

          i just don’t see how npm is letting this happen…
          im going to write an npm module called “true” that just returns true…

        • @xor@infosec.pubEnglish
          1•5 months ago

          well although 1 evaluates as true and zero as false, it’s not the same thing…
          so yes, i did…

      • 50gp
        1•5 months ago

        at which point do you blame the language for not implementing it natively?

        • Rikudou_SageAEnglish
          9•5 months ago

          I mean, does any language implement is_odd() natively? Doesn’t everyone implement modulus and pretty much assumes that you remember modulus from elementary and can infer that even numbers are those where x % 2 == 0.

        • Aatube
          6•5 months ago

          Isn’t %2 already native?

          (BTW this thing failed JavaScript so hard ECMA immediately included it in that year’s standard)

        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
          6•5 months ago

          at which point do you blame the language for not implementing it natively?

          Erm … What more native than number % 2 do you want to have it?

          • EpheraEnglish
            -3•5 months ago

            2.is_even()

            (I don’t know, if this is possible in JS.)

            • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
              4•5 months ago

              Let’s call the number variable just x, you then have literal math (Euclidean division) if you ignore === instead of = for equals.

              x % 2 === 0

              This can’t get better or more native than “just math”. This is the whole code you need to detect if a number is even. I wouldn’t even call it “code”.

              If you remove whitespaces and ignore the type you end up with x%2==0 which is 6 characters long and a fully valid if clause. No magic involved, no abstraction, no weird function calls on integers …

              I see that in modern JS this type of coding is a trend, but you can’t tell me you want to replace 6 characters with an own module or a package. :)

              • EpheraEnglish
                -1•5 months ago

                No, I want that in the std lib. Yes, it would just call x % 2 == 0 underneath. But the advantage is readability. I’m in principle aware that x % 2 == 0 is true when the number is even, but I need it seldomly enough that I do still need to think about it for a second before I know for sure. I don’t need to think about x.is_even(). And the readability is what I want natively, i.e. in the std lib.

                It being in the std lib would also sidestep your concerns about security or the function call having unknown side effects.