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Comment by jvehent | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty much what Rob Pike advocates in Go: "A little copying is better than a little dependency." http://go-proverbs.github.io/

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I pretty squarely disagree with Rob Pike on that one. Copying is how you introduce bugs and insulate yourself from upstream bugfixes. I'm suggesting that you should try to remove code first, add a dependency on well-trusted code if that doesn't work, and only copy/reinvent as a last resort.

  > I pretty squarely disagree with Rob Pike on that one.

TBH that's kind of an indication that you should rethink your position. Rob Pike has a lot of experience, he's seen a lot, and he knows what he's doing. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you shouldn't snap to the defensive position.

Rob Pike's authority does not counter the negative experience I've had with vendoring dependencies, making local changes, and drifting so far from upstream that it becomes extremely difficult to merge in bugfixes. Or the positive experience I've had with package managers making it easy to bring in third-party code, easier than copying it in.

little dependency is the keyword.

Little dependencies are fine. In fact, they're usually preferable: it leads to less code going unused.

> Rob Pike has a lot of experience, he's seen a lot, and he knows what he's doing.

So does pcwalton. Ever heard of https://www.rust-lang.org/ ?

It doesn't matter. If I were Einstein, and von Neumann disagreed with me, I would take that seriously, even though I were a super-genius etc.

I do take it seriously. I'm no super-programmer. Rob Pike is a better programmer than I am.

I just disagree with him on this one thing.

Deference to authority is a funny thing eh? I find that in life, and especially in running my business, I pretty frequently lock horns with people who disagree with me on account of a seemingly differing opinion of some other Experienced Person(R). It's like, such and such person has lots of experience in the industry, therefore they know the answer to this specific question better than you do, regardless of anything. When I hear these appeals to authority I always think that if I were actually sitting across the table from this Very Smart Person--as opposed to the person citing them--and they were willing to listen, we would probably end up in agreement. Like you say, the person might be WAY smarter than me in general, but... LOOK AT THE FUCKING DATA.

There's a reason smart people are good at solving problems, and it's not because they always defer to what other people 'know' to be true!

For me, that means I listen carefully for wisdom but have to speak louder when countering their occasional bullshit. Copying is considered a code smell by the likes of Fowler due to the problems it leads to. Also leads to bloat and performance issues. Better to cleanly, simply package up reusable solutions to problems like JSON or protocols (eg HTTP) then just keep importing the same one. You get lean apps plus a greater understanding of what they're doing.

And so does the person you hire down the line to extend that app. Never forget that part when talking copying and tweaking code. :)

An appeal to authority? To Patrick Walton?

That may true for Go, a language which still does not have a great dependency management story. I'm not sure this proverb is universal though.

Nice list. He clearly doesn't like reflection:

  > Clear is better than clever.
  > Reflection is never clear.

Of course, everything has its place, even reflection.

Reflection is a sign that your system is inadequate. In some (maybe even all) languages it may be necessary, but for a language designer it is a failure.

Eh, I am using reflection in a small (C#) project at work - I've had to implement a unit test system of sorts (yes, NIH, reinventing the wheel etc etc) and reflection lets me find all methods that return a particular type very easily. I agree it can become spaghetti very quickly but it is quite useful at times.

The funny thing being that the Golang stdlib uses reflection.

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