In last few years, JavaScript has become the most widely used language on earth. With the rise of JavaScript, especially node.js, the package manager of node, or npm has outplayed other popular package manager like pip (for python).

There are hundreds of thousands of packages and are still growing. No wonder there are some amazing works going on out the re in the community. However sometimes, looking at few packages, I question myself; WHY?

Here is the list of some of the fascinating npm packages :D

is-odd

This package is used to judge a number if it is not divisible by 2. Yup, just this much task. And look at the downloads. In last 7 days it is showing almost 3 million downloads.
Even I have some little bit more useful package like class to classname, but hardly touches 10 downloads a week :(, but this one is 3 million? Seriously?

is-number

I think I unnecessarily showed frustration on the previous package. Cause this little fellow has 10 million downloads last week. More than three times the is-odd. And can you overlook the 142 dependents? Damn!

is-even

Ah… finally, something in thousands. Well, for a moment you may say yeah it’s not that depressing case cause only 18k downloads, but I will say, it is more depressing for me. Why? Lemme show you the code of this package. I hope you can digest it.

is-thirteen

Over 3000 stars on github. Good, I am not at all sad… not at all. Rather I am planning to create repositories like, is-zero, is-one etc. Cause using === operator has been banned by government.

left-pad

I don’t know whether you came across an article, how 11 lines of code broke the internet; if not, you can read this.

This package just adds extra padding or white spaces in strings; something which is no more needed after ES7 or ES2016 came up with string padding, is still pretty useful for some packages it seems. Over 700 thousand downloads in last 7 days.

is-array

Another package with almost 50k downloads in last 7 days. And this does the exact thing which Array.isArray() does. But still few people are fond of it it seems.

is-object

is-plain-object

Another millionaire here. Over 3M downloads in last 7 days. And please don’t forget to look at the number of dependents. Well, atleast this package has more than 30 lines in its index file.

is-whitespace

This tiny package does a huge task for you. That is, to detect white spaces or spaces.

Why why why?

What these packages are doing is a very small task. Anyone can write those 4, 5 or 10 lines of code in his codebase to achieve the same. Then also why these huge amount of downloads?

The probable reason is download chain. Like, is-odd has a dependent nanomatch, which has a chain to webpack. So in a way, whenever you are using webpack you are using is-odd.
The cases can be similar with other packages as well. Like is-number is a dependency of is-odd.

Though I knew about few of these packages before, but this reddit post was really an amazing thread to read since last 2 days. I must thank the users whose gossip has been articulated in this post. This post is just for information and fun and is not meant to hurt anyone’s work or sentiments.