The focus on JavaScript here seems like it is drowning out your larger more important point (which is a great point!). My feeling is that the flood of trivial JS packages is due to the language’s...
The focus on JavaScript here seems like it is drowning out your larger more important point (which is a great point!). My feeling is that the flood of trivial JS packages is due to the language’s standard library being insufficient, so the 3rd party package ecosystems have tried to fill in the gaps. And some of those gaps are left-pad sized and shaped. Hell if that many projects are depending on a 3rd party dependency, maybe it should be scheduled to become a language feature/built-in?
Code re-use is good when it simplifies things. But the quote from Spolsky points out that removing dependencies can also be a simplifying process. That is the essence of the Unix philipsophy as I understand it. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Dependency management, esp. of more than a few libraries (not one-liners—libraries), is not Unix-y in my experience.
The focus on JavaScript here seems like it is drowning out your larger more important point (which is a great point!). My feeling is that the flood of trivial JS packages is due to the language’s standard library being insufficient, so the 3rd party package ecosystems have tried to fill in the gaps. And some of those gaps are left-pad sized and shaped. Hell if that many projects are depending on a 3rd party dependency, maybe it should be scheduled to become a language feature/built-in?
Code re-use is good when it simplifies things. But the quote from Spolsky points out that removing dependencies can also be a simplifying process. That is the essence of the Unix philipsophy as I understand it. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Dependency management, esp. of more than a few libraries (not one-liners—libraries), is not Unix-y in my experience.
I followup to part 1, Following the Unix philosophy without getting left-pad