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by Nadya 584 days ago
And this is how you end up with rewriting the world and spending more time rewriting dozens of existing libraries to avoid adding them as dependencies and less time working on the problem you're actually trying to solve because you're fixing the same dozen bugs that the first person already went through the trouble of fixing for you had you simply used their library instead of eschewing it and having to learn everything that they had already learned for you. Often times because the problem space is deeper than you could have known before getting into the weeds and hopefully you don't get bit by sunk cost and decide to do yourself a favor and just use a library instead of continuing to work on solving problems that aren't related to what you set out to do.

There's a balance to be struck between LeftPad scenarios and "Now there are 37 competing libraries".
2 comments
hathawsh 584 days ago
Exactly. The right thing to do is study each dependency and decide whether the reward of having the problem solved quickly is worth the many risks of adding dependencies.

I'll acknowledge here that there seems to be a significant difference between Python projects and Node projects: in my experience, a small Python project has a handful of dependencies and maybe a dozen sub-dependencies, while a small Node project usually has a handful of dependencies and a few hundred sub-dependencies. That's where Python's "batteries included" motto does seem to help.

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tmpz22 583 days ago
> There's a balance to be struck between LeftPad scenarios and "Now there are 37 competing libraries".

I think we're actually in agreement. My assertion is that for projects which want to avoid constant maintenance, particularly small projects, you can make architectural decisions some of which could significantly improve the maintenance outcome. Of course there are trade-offs to those, and if you make the wrong architectural decisions it can cause more harm than good.

Maybe I'm glib for calling it "easy" but for many leftpad scenarios it really is a "holy crap why did you think that was ok" scenario in my experience. Lets avoid those scenarios when we can.

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