Jonathan Blow on Removing Dependencies

Absolutely. This is part of the reason I refuse to go back to JavaScript work, because JavaScript developers don't live in that world.

Everybody claims to want software that achieves better performance and better durability. Even in JavaScript land people claim to want better performance and better durability. Yet, when it comes down to taking ownership or actually doing the work there is no greater evil, so there is a lot of lip service and whining there.

As an experiment just mention replacing some dependencies at work in JavaScript land with some code you have written and see what happens. There aren't salaries large enough to go back to that.

> But the thing to realize is most of this implementation is spam. It is mostly doing things for people who are not you, for reasons you don't necessarily agree with, chosen by a decision-making method that is deeply flawed.

It's not flawed. It's just made by people whose goals differ from yours.

He really hit the nail on the head with the part about realizing you only need 8% of what a dependency provides a lot of the time.

I recall working on a project where we were using some really old WPF library that provided a bunch of controls for doing things like dropdown menus, data grouping, etc.

We were doing an upgrade of the project, and this library was holding us back since it was stuck on an older version of .NET Framework. I realized we only needed that dropdown functionality since we didn't use anything else from the library.

Ultimately, I just copied the dropdown logic directly from the library, but rewriting it myself wouldn't have been a big undertaking either (it just happened to be open source, so I figured if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

The smaller the supply chain, the smaller the chance of supply-chain attacks. I program mostly in Java these days, and I have always been very careful of adding external dependencies to my code bases. A few times I have in fact replaced a commonly-used dependency with a home-grown own; and yes, I've been very happy.

This sure does attribute a lot to malice what could be adequately explained by stupidity.