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Kit Rhett Aultman

@darius People wonder why I'm exceptionally cranky and leery of the dev ecosystems surrounding newer languages. Well, there you go right there. That's why.

7 comments
Darius Kazemi

@roadriverrail I simply assumed that all languages that support dependencies have this problem... is there a mature and widely-used language ecosystem that doesn't?

Maybe it's Eyesaline

@darius @roadriverrail You're correct that any language ecosystem is vulnerable to this. NPM seems to be more vulnerable due to the vast number of dependencies, which is a direct consequence of the dev community deciding that every oneliner requires its own package.

Badly-optimised primate

@ieure @darius @roadriverrail I still don't know why people evangelise node. It's not worse than many other things but even in the best light its not _better_

Darius Kazemi

@moopet @ieure @roadriverrail I think Node can be convenient if you already know frontend JavaScript and would like to do some server-side work. For big projects I'd rather have a server written in something else, though there are exceptions like if it's a web app and you want to easily port code back and forth between client and server. When I was making browser based games that was a huge help.

Kit Rhett Aultman

@darius Technically, you're correct that anything can eventually deprecate and if you rely on it you can be suck. That said, there are language ecosystems that aren't an anarchic mess of indie developers and their tiny projects living and dying all the time, nor the focus on just pulling what you need from github whenever you need it. Other ecosystems let you package your dependencies. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot less in C, for example.

Darius Kazemi

@roadriverrail heh, node/npm let you package your dependencies (hence their recent-ish introduction of `package-lock.json`) but.... not a lot of people actually do it

Kit Rhett Aultman

@darius In general, I just find there to be, in many modern language ecosystems, a culture of "fast, lazy, and glib" that dominates and comes out in ways like this. Another example is in the proliferation of TUI in new languages that just casually assumes UTF-8 and emoji support, rather than finding and improving on what ncurses already offers us. If it's not fun, sexy, and cheap, who cares what gets left behind?

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