user-home

I agree that there is a definite cost of dependencies. I don't agree with the implication that these small modules are frivolous - doing one thing and doing it well is a time honored Unix principle. It saves developers from having to roll their own dependency, and gives them free wins if the package is well maintained and widely used. Edge cases are often identified and accounted for, even if the responsibility of the package is tiny. The example you gave was a poor choice - read further down https://github.com/sindresorhus/user-home#why-not-just-use-t.... It exists to avoid exactly the problem that sparked the conversation around npm today.

> I don't think it's necessarily "most programming languages". I know Perl, and probably Python and Ruby, have very large ecosystems of small modules. I suspect it's more along the lines of static vs dynamic, or compiled vs interpreted. The Perl, Python, and Ruby communities might have a lot of "small-ish" modules, compared to something like Boost in C++, but the Node.js community has really taken it to a new extreme with an explosion of "one-liner" modules like the absurd user-home https://github.com/sindresorhus/user-home The rallying cry of this movement is "Modules are Cheap in Node.js!". Incidents like this help demonstrate that explosive growth of your dependency graph isn't ever cheap, in any language.