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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

Whenever a "you might not need this heavy, popular lib" gets posted to HN, the responses are always pretty divided. I always try and write my own functions and import things like lodash, underscore, jQuery, and moment as a last resort. Bundle size may not be that important to the people working on prototypes and side projects, but it certainly is to many other people.

If a library is heavy, it is in their interest to organize it instead as a collection of submodules that can be depended on individually (IIRC, lodash does this) otherwise they risk people just not using their stuff.

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I’ve picked up node and js more seriously recently, coming from .Net and C# and I’ve been wondering why people in my learning material are relying so much on third party libraries for very basic things.

I’m probably a little old fashioned, but I didn’t even know moment existed and I’ve been fooling around quite a bit with JS dates recently. It didn’t take a long time to write the .ToString(dd-MM-yyyy) module, that was the only thing I really needed aside from the standard library, but I guess it would’ve been faster to import moment.js.

I've definitely made my peace with it. Think of it this way: how much better is a bunch of imports than the slew of stackexchange copy-pasta you'd find in an old PHP app?

Think of it this way: how much safer is the slew of stackexchange copy-pasta, which might have at least been fully read. And it doesn't add another dependency that might steal your credentials or your customer's credentials in the future.

(moment.js supports a huge number of localizations, which is impressive and good for i18n. so in this case maybe it isn't directly comparable to copy&paste for anything but trivial use-cases.)

You are not accounting for adding proper unit tests...

Let's be honest though, if someone's copy-pasting from Stack Exchange, they're probably not reading or understanding the whole thing they're copying either.

My rule in code reviews is if you're basing/copying something from the internet, you better be able to explain everything it's doing, and if you're pulling a dependency you better be able to explain why we need it and why you think it's trustworthy enough to put in our application.

One unique thing to js that the backend usually doesn't have to deal with is a lot of edge-cases with different browsers. That's (at least for me) the main motivation to use 3rd party libs when ever possible, hoping that they know more than me, and have invested more time in testing and thinking about all the possibilities... and usually it's true

Coming from .NET you should know Noda Time (https://nodatime.org) and the problem it solves. Consider moment the JS alternative, however, with JS native Date being more limited / broken than .NET's DateTime.

TL;DR: Goes way beyond standard formatting.

The C# DateTime has more useful methods than JS Date, but DateTimeKind and the way it counts ticks makes it an absolute trap for anyone to use, so I wouldn't say it's less broken.

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