This is such an important topic that feels like it's hardly ever talked about. In the common lisp world, it's pretty much a cultural norm to use as few dependen

This is such an important topic that feels like it's hardly ever talked about. In the common lisp world, it's pretty much a cultural norm to use as few dependencies as possible and stick close to the spec, because part of the strength of CL lies in it having an extremely stable spec with a lot of high quality implementations. Adding dependencies reduces the stability of your project and potentially its portability, which are both serious downsides to consider that are worthy of auditing. Also, in my personal opinion, another strength of CL is that you can get a lot done with far less, which usually makes relying on third party dependencies less necessary, and you can consequently usually fit other people's code in your head pretty easily. In the nightmare hellscape of mainstream languages like JS and Python on the other hand, it's common practice for projects to have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of dependencies -- and that's without even taking into consideration the dependencies of those dependencies, and then furthermore whether those dependencies are pinned. But since this is JS or Python, the dependencies are almost certainly pinned, which causes even more headaches that makes packaging software in a reproducible and auditable way practically impossible for certain languages. And since there's no stable spec and usually only one implementation, no one thinks about portability at all either; you get what you get and if you're lucky it's not impossible to port to an OS other than Linux. This problem of portability is only compounded on by the potentially massive amount of dependencies some of these projects will have. I don't understand how anyone lives like this but people really need to start being more responsible with the code they put out into the world. Or one could just take up Drew's satirical software eco-terrorism as the only possible viable praxis for abolishing the present state of software development...