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> Interesting. As a typescript user with a million npm packages this surprises me. In the sense of “managed dependencies” JS/TS has tons of packages, but I’m ge

by timr 2y ago

> Interesting. As a typescript user with a million npm packages this surprises me. In the sense of “managed dependencies” JS/TS has tons of packages, but I’m getting the sense that you mean something else? The very fact that you cite Typescript (itself a hack built on top of Javascript to make up for its deficiencies), and npm (a third-party packaging system...since, you know...JS doesn't/didn't have one), is just emphasizing my point. Setting aside the goodness or badness of either of these things, you're so immersed in the complexity of all of the hacks that you don't even see it anymore. It's the old joke about the fish and water. Imagine a world where packages and types were a built-in, first-class feature of the language...oh wait.

bbor 2y ago
What language has a built in dependency system…? How would that even work? I’m confused. Every dependency system is a registry of dependencies vetted by some group, along with one or more compilers/runtimes that know how to speak that group’s format. Who cares if the group is GitHub (TIL… ew, tbf) vs. the language nonprofit itself? Also, more importantly by far: can you point me to what language(s) you’re talking about? C++ doesn’t seem to have a “built in” dependency manager, just vcpkg and Conan. Python has poetry, anaconda, and pip, the latter of which is run by the Python nonprofit — but something tells me that’s not the old school classic you’re referencing lol. Java has ant, gradle, and Maven, none of which seem official. I guess we’re talking about ruby, since their manager is published by a group that claims ownership of the language (https://rubycentral.org/ https://rubycentral.org/)? Basically I’m still not sure what im missing. I very much might be a fish in water, and I am a newbie to all of this, relatively! But I’ve never once noticed a real difference in the languages I’ve developed in professionally (those mentioned above, minus ruby) so I’m not sure what ruby’s being more “first-class” gets me. At a certain point, if your build system is setup using boilerplate, then the two steps are 1. Download package, 2. Import package into relevant file and start calling its members. What part of that can be improved?
- timr 2y ago
  > What language has a built in dependency system…? Literally every language with support for modules that extend across files has some form of dependency management. Even C -- simple as it is -- has headers and source files which separate interface from implementation. Some languages go further (e.g. Ruby), and have far more developed, standard systems of version management built right in -- rubygems will do the graph analysis of your module includes, resolve dependency cycles, enforce versioning, and so on. Python is a total mess when it comes to high-level dependency management, but only because it offers 3-4 different "standard" ways of doing it! Notably, Javascript didn't even have the the export or import keywords until ES6 (2015). It had literally no support for even the primitive, C-like version of the idea, and there were multiple competing implementations of it, from Node, to CommonJS, to RequireJS, Webpack, Babel and so on. But you still can't get rid of webpack, though -- JS has no built-in notion of minification or tree pruning, so that's all still implemented via a panoply of third-party tools.

by timr 2y ago

bbor 2y ago

What language has a built in dependency system…? How would that even work? I’m confused. Every dependency system is a registry of dependencies vetted by some group, along with one or more compilers/runtimes that know how to speak that group’s format. Who cares if the group is GitHub (TIL… ew, tbf) vs. the language nonprofit itself? Also, more importantly by far: can you point me to what language(s) you’re talking about? C++ doesn’t seem to have a “built in” dependency manager, just vcpkg and Conan. Python has poetry, anaconda, and pip, the latter of which is run by the Python nonprofit — but something tells me that’s not the old school classic you’re referencing lol. Java has ant, gradle, and Maven, none of which seem official. I guess we’re talking about ruby, since their manager is published by a group that claims ownership of the language (https://rubycentral.org/ https://rubycentral.org/)? Basically I’m still not sure what im missing. I very much might be a fish in water, and I am a newbie to all of this, relatively! But I’ve never once noticed a real difference in the languages I’ve developed in professionally (those mentioned above, minus ruby) so I’m not sure what ruby’s being more “first-class” gets me. At a certain point, if your build system is setup using boilerplate, then the two steps are 1. Download package, 2. Import package into relevant file and start calling its members. What part of that can be improved?

timr 2y ago
> What language has a built in dependency system…? Literally every language with support for modules that extend across files has some form of dependency management. Even C -- simple as it is -- has headers and source files which separate interface from implementation. Some languages go further (e.g. Ruby), and have far more developed, standard systems of version management built right in -- rubygems will do the graph analysis of your module includes, resolve dependency cycles, enforce versioning, and so on. Python is a total mess when it comes to high-level dependency management, but only because it offers 3-4 different "standard" ways of doing it! Notably, Javascript didn't even have the the export or import keywords until ES6 (2015). It had literally no support for even the primitive, C-like version of the idea, and there were multiple competing implementations of it, from Node, to CommonJS, to RequireJS, Webpack, Babel and so on. But you still can't get rid of webpack, though -- JS has no built-in notion of minification or tree pruning, so that's all still implemented via a panoply of third-party tools.