The node package manager, also known as npm, is a crucial part of the Javascript library ecosystem. Many of the most popular JS libraries and frameworks, such as ReactJS, JQuery, AngularJS, etc., are primarily downloaded from npm.

In fact, there’s one curious little npm package with over 60 million downloads, a package so incredibly useful and revolutionary that nearly every JS developer has installed this, or one of its dependents at least once in their lives. Have you ever used WebPack or ReactJS? Because both of those packages are dependents of this aforementioned mysterious package.

And the name of that revolutionary package? It’s is-odd. A package whose only purpose is to tell you whether a number is odd or not.

So What Else Does Is-Odd Do?

You’re probably thinking that there’s no way a package whose only job is to tell you if a number is odd or not, could possibly accrue 60 million downloads. Surely, it must do something else.

Fortunately, the source code never lies.

const isNumber = require('is-number');

module.exports = function isOdd(value) {
  const n = Math.abs(value);
  if (!isNumber(n)) {
    throw new TypeError('expected a number');
  }
  if (!Number.isInteger(n)) {
    throw new Error('expected an integer');
  }
  if (!Number.isSafeInteger(n)) {
    throw new Error('value exceeds maximum safe integer');
  }
  return (n % 2) === 1;
};

Aside from doing type checking to ensure that something is actually a number, it quite literally only runs (n % 2 == 1)

And that’s it. Over 60 million downloads, to run a single line of code.

“But what about all of the type checking?”. The type checking is a non-issue, because if it was ever a problem, then that means your code has an edge case that makes nearly no sense. For example, how would it ever be possible for you to accidentally check if a string is an even number, and not have this mistake get caught somewhere else in your code, like the input/data-fetching step?

Furthermore, if you seriously anticipate that the type might be wrong, then you would also have to wrap your code in a try catch statement. If you’re still not convinced, we can attempt to extend this philosophy by deprecating the “+” operator in JavaScript and replacing it with this function:

const isNumber = require('is-number');

module.exports = function add-numbers(value1, value2) {
  if (!isNumber(value1)) {
    throw new TypeError('expected a number for first input');
  }
  if (!isNumber(value2)) {
    throw new TypeError('expected a number for second input');
  }
  return value1 + value2
};

Now, anytime you want to add two numbers, you can’t just do value1 + value2. You’d have to do this instead:

try {
  add-numbers(value1, value2)
} catch(err) {
  console.log("Error! " + err);
}

But there’s a glaring problem here. With the is-odd package, we can check if a number is odd, but what if it’s even? Which of these three things would you do?

1. Simply write (n % 2 == 0)
2. The opposite of odd is even, so just do !isOdd(n)
3. Create an entirely new npm package, complete with a test suite, TravisCL integration, and an MIT License.

Both 1 and 2 are the obvious sensible options, and yet, option 3, which is the aptly-named is-even package, was the option of choice.

So we’ve created an entirely new npm package, which has its own set of dependents. And this package has over 100,000 weekly downloads! What’s in the source code, then?

var isOdd = require('is-odd');

module.exports = function isEven(i) {
  return !isOdd(i);
};

A one-liner, with no logic other than reversing the result of another package’s function. And it’s dependency is is-odd!

So what exactly is wrong with having all of these tiny and largely useless dependencies? The more dependencies your project has, especially if those dependencies are not from verified and secure sources, the more likely you are to face security risks.

Like that one time a popular npm package spammed everyone’s build logs with advertisements, causing npm to ban terminal ads, or perhaps that other scandal where a core npm library tried to steal people’s cryptocurrencies.

Dependencies should be useful, non-trivial, and secure, which is why packages like is-even and is-odd don’t make any sense from a developmental standpoint. They’re so incredibly trivial (one-liners), that even adding them to your project is just a massive security and developmental risk with zero upside. Unfortunately, is-odd is firmly cemented in the history of npm, and most major packages include it as an essential dependency. There is no escape from single-line npm packages anytime in the foreseeable future.