Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

One of the common trends in JavaScript is the proliferation of dependencies...there are 25 listed (+ Backbone makes 26). It's a fragile chain that requires a lot of people to provide attention to maintenance of all that supporting infrastructure. And it requires each of them not to be on the wrong side of a "non-negotiable" feature requirement for each developer making a decision to use it and has to be beloved enough that each maintaining developer is willing to fix bugs and update their library for no other reason than to make it appear "fresh."

View on HN

I think this is strongly tied to the current fad have having every micro-library be "dependency free". I don't fully understand the appeal.

"Here's my tool that is superior because it has no dependencies. Will you make it your next dependency?"

I understand the appeal when you have a very small set of problems and ultimate flexibility, but this always ends up in a lot of duplication of effort and code (how many libraries have a denounce method, or other general utility method?)

Maybe to rephrase, I understand the benefits, I guess I just don't understand the persistence of the fad in the face all of the drawbacks.

You probably meant debounce. I'm now thinking of all the things I could use denounce() for.

to be clear, I don't think anyone is using all of these libraries in a single project. Most Backbone web apps probably use 2-6 of these repos. So the fact that some of them have gone stale is not in itself a problem, and is normal. The fact that nearly all of them have makes it much more difficult to build sophisticated web apps with Backbone. Everything non-trivial has to be done in an in-house ad-hoc basis, or using lightly maintained 3rd party code.

I didn't read your article as making that case. My riff was more on the exponential size of the dependency space. Even if someone is only using 5 external libraries, if one of them is among the 25 listed, the dependency chain can easily become burdensome.

To a first approximation, I think the default for JavaScript development is to treat taking on dependencies lightly. And because the JavaScript zeitgeist moves from project to project so quickly, there's often no historical base to take on supporting open source projects when the original author moves on. I mean Jeremy Ashkenash can take a motorcycle trip in part because of his decision that Backbone is not evolving quickly. The idea that things must evolve quickly equates to more work and more work is a recipe for burnout.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com