[_pmf_]

> Having been a dev team of 1 for a long time I'd never experienced the headache of installing all the dependencies required by our Django system. It never really occurred to me that as I installed more packages, it was becoming incrementally larger and more complicated for new team members. Because of this, the monolithic Django system was already proving a headache to get quickly set up, running and understood by our new hires. Splitting it up into more digestible chunks (services) therefore should allow us to scale the team a lot quicker this year and beyond.

Yet, the dynamic language community constantly laughs at Java developers and their high overhead dependency management solutions, which just happen to have these kinds of problems solved since more than a decade.

Pathetic.

[iends]

I don't believe he's talking about code dependencies but rather things like LDAP, mySQL, MongoDB, etc which Java dependency management tools don't solve either. Managing code dependencies is solved in Python (as it is in most dynamic languages) using pip and virtual environments.

[lmm]

IME, encouraging people to only run part of the system results in a more fragile environment, and devs who can't fix problems in the wrong part of the system or change boundaries that were put in the wrong place. Everyone should be encouraged to be full-stack; specializing on one part or the other is ok, but you should be able to chase things into other components where necessary.

From the talk of "packages" I think the original was talking about code dependencies. But it's worth saying that you can manage external dependencies the same way, with something like puppet.

[iends]

I wasn't trying to advocate only running part of the system.

Of course you can use things like puppet, but the comment I was replying to was saying these were solved problems in the Java world for more than a decade which isn't exactly true.