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I don't really worry about something I could write in an afternoon. I can look at the code, get a good grasp of it (hopefully), judge the quality, docs, prospe

I don't really worry about something I could write in an afternoon. I can look at the code, get a good grasp of it (hopefully), judge the quality, docs, prospects of getting updates/needing updates/being able to update it myself, pretty comfortably. In other words, the risk evaluation is incredibly straight forward. Additionally, the risk itself is fairly low. If it goes out of date or stops working or just turns out to suck, the most I risked is an afternoon of work. Leftpad was a debacle due to it's scale, but fixing Leftpad was pretty easy (I'm not recommending importing one liners as dependencies mind you) - But when it comes to stuff that isn't small, it's usually also the kind of stuff that holds the most insane amounts of risk for a project and is the hardest to evaluate. Stuff like application frameworks, threading frameworks, massive networking libraries, etc. The interface is _huge_. To the point that even when you try and wrap their complexity in nice packages with separation of concern and encapsulation they leak out into the rest of your code and end up being a nightmare to ever change. Instead of spending an afternoon writing dependencies like this, spend that time investigating your "too-big-to-fail" dependencies. Try and keep a finger on their pulse, because they're the ones that will really come back to bite you if things go south.

mcqueenjordan 6y ago
> Additionally, the risk itself is fairly low. If it goes out of date or stops working or just turns out to suck, the most I risked is an afternoon of work. Sometimes, the opportunity cost (time spent) is the largest term in the risk equation, but often there are other terms that might be orders of magnitude larger. For example, the risk of depending on the wrong abstraction, or becoming coupled to a hack. What you're saying makes sense. My only point is that there's a lot more subtle judgment required in these decisions than often meets the eye.

mcqueenjordan 6y ago

> Additionally, the risk itself is fairly low. If it goes out of date or stops working or just turns out to suck, the most I risked is an afternoon of work. Sometimes, the opportunity cost (time spent) is the largest term in the risk equation, but often there are other terms that might be orders of magnitude larger. For example, the risk of depending on the wrong abstraction, or becoming coupled to a hack. What you're saying makes sense. My only point is that there's a lot more subtle judgment required in these decisions than often meets the eye.