There are lots of useful titbits often left out of a languages corelib.
Back in the day we would have built up various pieces of library code, which we would have utilised rather than continually guessing best practices. For example, the isArray method cited may be trivial but is also non obvious. We'd probably have something like that in our library of useful snippets.
Sometimes we may have shared the code on forums and the like and people would copy and paste the code, sometimes into their own libraries. We would locate them by browsing known locations or inefficiently querying search engines
Now we utilise a central resource and simple tools to have a global library of code. Instead of searching far and wide we query a handful of tools that effectively does the copying and pasting for us.
How that can be considered a bad thing is beyond me. It's not a question of knowing how to code, it's a question of using your time effectively.
Granted, there is the problem of so-called modules being removed and dependencies breaking. This can be alleviated by vendoring your modules, a simple task with most dependency management tools.
Personally I think that published modules should persistent indefinitely based on the license the code utilises, although I'm not clear on the actual legalities of the recent npm issue (although if it's due to a trademark complaint, I don't see how it would ever be enforceable for completely unrelated code in any slightly sane country).
Back in the day we would have built up various pieces of library code, which we would have utilised rather than continually guessing best practices. For example, the isArray method cited may be trivial but is also non obvious. We'd probably have something like that in our library of useful snippets.
Sometimes we may have shared the code on forums and the like and people would copy and paste the code, sometimes into their own libraries. We would locate them by browsing known locations or inefficiently querying search engines
Now we utilise a central resource and simple tools to have a global library of code. Instead of searching far and wide we query a handful of tools that effectively does the copying and pasting for us.
How that can be considered a bad thing is beyond me. It's not a question of knowing how to code, it's a question of using your time effectively.
Granted, there is the problem of so-called modules being removed and dependencies breaking. This can be alleviated by vendoring your modules, a simple task with most dependency management tools.
Personally I think that published modules should persistent indefinitely based on the license the code utilises, although I'm not clear on the actual legalities of the recent npm issue (although if it's due to a trademark complaint, I don't see how it would ever be enforceable for completely unrelated code in any slightly sane country).