[austincheney]

I am often of the impression that it is ok to start with many dependencies to get an application into an experimental state quickly, but ultimately this is extremely immature. As the application becomes polished over time and as there are refinements to increase performance, reduce complexity, and trim some fat many of the dependencies will go away. The reason why many dependencies peel off a maturing application is that as the programmers become more involved and aware of their knowledge domain they have to ask themselves if they can simply "do it better and faster on their own", which is likely.

Unfortunately many applications, or their programmers, never reach maturity. Also there is greater security and dependability in managing certain critical functionality more directly instead of relying upon support from a third party that may not exist with the same level of compatibility in the future.

[adrianratnapala]

As the application becomes polished over time and as there are refinements to increase performance, reduce complexity, and trim some fat many of the dependencies will go away.

Do you find that many teams have the discipline to do this? The cynic in me says that software far more often gets slower, more complicated, fat and dependency ridden over time.

More constructively I could ask: what is it that gives a team or project the discipline to do this work of improvement. How could I encourage such a virtue in my own environment?

[austincheney]

> Do you find that many teams have the discipline to do this?

It depends on the motivation. Ultimately it comes down to discipline.

As applications get popular over time their code base starts to age and get filled with chaotic cobwebs as new features are added or requirements shift. If you don't really care you will do the minimum required to complete your assigned task and await the next assigned task. This is what it is like when the people who do the actual work have no skin in the game. There is no sense of failure so long as you ship unbroken code, and so everything is very mediocre. If you completely suck as a developer then mediocre is your personal resounded success, and so what is just another layer of abstraction if it makes your job easier.

In startups, personal projects, or ambitious open source initiatives failure and pressure are constant reminders of reality. Everything is highly visible and it is always your fault until you ship something amazingly awesome. You need to ship quality code and make changes in the shortest time possible without dicking up the application. You don't want to get caught with your pants down updating a very simple bug only to discover a larger series of bugs in code you don't own that prevents you from shipping your little tiny code fix.

Also keep in mind that nobody (well... very rarely) is going to look into your code to see if you have a million dependencies, but they know when applications are slow heavy pieces of crap. If an application constantly breaks because the dependencies don't play well together and your developers lack the confidence to solve elementary problems your brittle house of cards pisses people off. I am a web guy and many major companies ignore these problems by doubling down on their branding, instead of training their people to write better code, which really pisses me off.

> what is it that gives a team or project the discipline to do this work of improvement.

Ownership of success/failure. When your job or equity are directly impacted (the more directly the better) the emotional connection to quality drastically changes. I apply this level of thinking to my big open source project even though I lose money on it, because I know people depend upon me and I own it. I can be more successful than I am now if I continue to improve what I own or I can be a disappointing failure.

This is harder than it sounds because metrics of product quality the confidence to attain such a level of quality differ by experience. Not everybody has years and years of experience. In that case you need somebody who can supply some technical leadership and not be afraid to hurt people's feelings when things get tough.