Minimalistic npm packages.

A follow up to my previous post, this time we look into some of the lesser known, but widely used javascript packages.

Javascript’s NPM package manager, is one of the biggest and fastest growing package manager out there. As of writing this:

• RubyGems - 145,675 (25 new packages/day)
• PyPI - 149,111 (104 new packages/day)
• Packagist - 191,577 (103 new packages/day)
• Maven Central - 244,143 (149 new packages/day)
• npm - 679,009 (508 new packages/day)

Minimalism doesn’t only apply to design, lifestyle and ownership, but also to code. Here are some of the most minimal packages in npm:

is-false

Returns false if the value of a property is either strictly false, or it’s inverse is strictly true.

5 weekly downloads

Let’s take a look at its github repository:

Pretty standard set of files. You’ve got your test cases, test runner config, editor config, lint config, and other necessary files. Let’s look at the code:

Absolute minimalism.

is-even

Return true if the given number is even.

27,881 weekly downloads

This was slightly more minimalistic.

is-positive-integer

check if a number is a positive integer

173 weekly downloads

Oh, the beauty!^*

More:

• is-array (18,412 weekly downloads)
• is-string (785,069 weekly downloads)
• is-object (1,177,287 weekly downloads)
• array-length (11 weekly downloads)
• is-empty-array (20 weekly downloads)
• is-non-empty-array (3 weekly downloads)

^{* The author has updated the code to a very non-minimalistic monstrosity. But for the sake of this post, we are gonna pretend that the initial commit is where it’s at.}