[shortoncash]

No. Git is better, GitHub is better, most package managers for finding things are better, stack overflow is better, help forums are better, tools are often free, cloud access and compute power is better, instructional videos on youtube are better, online classes are better.

I don't want to go back to 10 years ago and definitely not 20 years ago. I have never been more productive than now.

[greysteil]

+1 for package managers. Hard to imagine programming without them, and they're much better now than 10 years ago.

[shortoncash]

The maintainers of package managers and individual packages probably save humanity so many hours and probably are propelling our entire civilization forward in ways they probably don't even comprehend. The days before widespread package managers were really dark and terrible, and arguably the developer dark ages.

[toomuchtodo]

And those package manager maintainers (all the way from distros to software libraries) don’t see a dime of compensation for it, while companies use open source tooling to create enormous valuations. It’s a shame.

We salute you package maintainers!

[jonny_eh]

And ragging on them seems to be a favourite past-time of HN. I'm a huge fan of literally any package manager.

[golergka]

People only complain about things they actively use.

[johnx123-up]

Anyone feels Usenet is better than stack overflow?

[gaius]

No. You can spend 10x as long downloading random libraries and utilities looking for the perfect one than it would take to just write the function you need, and then you haul in a massive stack of dependencies that makes your project fragile and your build times long. I see projects now with literally hundreds of external dependencies. And if one of them breaks or suffers a security compromise you are toast. Say no to PyPI, NPM, Github and all the rest.

[in9]

HUuuum idk about security being a problem now a days. The community overlook in an opensource library vastly outweighs my capabilities of writing secure libraries.

[gaius]

The community overlook in an opensource library

Haha really? https://mail.python.org/pipermail/security-announce/2017-Sep...

It’s the Wild West out there. And then there’s NPM...