4 ms·

I haven't seen this perspective before but it's a very elegant explanation for why e.g. npm is so much scarier than maven. I wonder if safety could be improved

• Veserv 1y ago
  Newer languages have made packaging and importing dependencys significantly easier, but have done this while increasing coupling and making switching dependencys harder. This results in brittle dependency trees. Using a private package manager, intermixing private and public, and substituting arbitrary dependencys with compatible alternatives, i.e. modularity, should be easy. Only then does solving the problem become easy. What we used to have is a big ball of mud. Modern languages made it easier to decompose a system into components. But what we really want is easily decomposing a system into modular components which is yet unsolved.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    > What we used to have is a big ball of mud. Modern languages made it easier to decompose a system into components. But what we really want is easily decomposing a system into modular components which is yet unsolved. We need to take modularity a lot more seriously, and by this I don't mean just making things more pluggable, but also well-defined component boundaries and contracts on them. Sadly a lot of this stuff is moving at a glacial pace, and little of it is mainstream. Design-by-contract was introduced 40 years ago, and yet no mainstream PL in use offers anything past the bare minimum (asserts). Niche tech like Ada SPARK is picking it up, but even there it took decades. And now we throw AI into the mix and expect things to work. Madness.