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Changes to the platform or dependencies break working code. This is increasingly hard to ignore when app stores stop vending your product to older versions of a
by sowbug 3y ago
Changes to the platform or dependencies break working code. This is increasingly hard to ignore when app stores stop vending your product to older versions of a platform, even if it's working fine.
And working code, no matter how well it works, imposes a cost to implementing new features. A new feature might be a cinch to implement in a new app. But it can easily take much longer to implement the same feature in an existing app.
- Jensson 3y ago> Changes to the platform or dependencies break working code Not all code. You have platform dependent code and then code that doesn't depend on anything outside of your own code. The code with no outside dependencies can easily stay around unchanged for decades and is not a liability. "All dependencies are liabilities" I could agree with. Dependencies are technical debt that will continue to demand interest from you, they are often worth it but they are the main source of maintenance burden. Some are unavoidable if you need to interface with an API, but many are not.
- MrJohz 3y agoUnless you're deploying your code bare-metal on a machine with no OS, you've got software dependencies, and even in that situation you've got hardware dependencies. I think the idea of dependency-free code is a myth that we like to use based on the abstraction layers we're comfortable with - if I'm okay assuming that a given layer always Just Works™, then it magically stops being a dependency and becomes the new ground level. That said, I agree that it's helpful to think of dependencies in terms of their potential liability as well as their benefit.