When programming in any established language, developers already know the fortes and pitfalls of the language, hence try to compensate by adding meta libraries and modules.
Meta modules are pieces of code which complement the std library or the language itself by adding features which are very useful, but just not present. They do not serve an application-specific purpose.
I have caught myself quite often adding such bundles in different languages, however I was always glad I did. For me those are the libraries, modules and packages I usually add before starting to write the logic. What are your meta-packages?
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Professional human being for 29 years
In every Node.JS project I use bunyan for logging
I write a lot of meta abstractions myself, because ... I'm lazy :). But there is no standard pkg/lib I use anymore usually I add things to a project and extract them as libraries if I need them again.
Often they are framework specific traits like "ApplicationLogTrait" or something. nothing fancy. just a getter for my logging which I fetch from a registry pattern or a parser / transformers such tedious "match that, turn it into" things like "camelCase to snake_case to kebab-case" or "create a cache proxy for class XYZ".
But as I mentioned I write a lot of this stuff myself and just throw it into the pkg managers not carrying if anyone else uses it ;D ....
Kleo Petrov
That's a really great question. So, if we talk about meta modules as a modules that adds missing features to an established language, I simply can't miss Lodash.
Lodash doesn't need introduction. The library is packed with tons of helper functions, currently missing from the ECMAScript Spec or extending the native ones. I hardly imagine a project that won't benefit from it.
Ramda is another example of a library worth mentioning. It's a library aimed at providing functional programming style in JavaScript, just how we need it.
For some time now, I've been using pretty-error for logging Node.js errors. It's a small tool for showing errors with less clutter. Just look at it: