A critique of package managers

"When using Go for example, you don’t need any third-party libraries to make a web server, Go has it all there and you are done."

Fine, now what if you need to connect to a database, or parse a PDF, or talk to a grpc backend. What a hilariously short-sighted example.

To me, this whole article just screams inexperience.

Inexperience of an author who develops quite successful programming language for like 10 years? Quite a bold statement.

Actually his perspective is quite reasonable. Go is in the other part of the spectrum than languages encouraging "left-pad"-type of libraries, and this is a good thing.

I've seen plenty of intelligent people acting pretty stupid.

As my psychology professor used to say. "Smart is how efficiently use your intelligence. Or don't."

So someone pretty low IQ can be smart - Forrest Gump. Or someone high IQ can be dumb occasionally - a professor so very attuned to his research topic at expense of everything else.

How is this relating to the alleged inexperience of the original author? Not sure what do you mean.

The above comment is merely pointing out that a 10y+ experienced language designer can still have naive viewpoints on application development. Anyone who's built a non-trivial userspace application knows that realistically you'll have to reach outside a particular languages standard library in most cases to provide value without reinventing wheels.

In other words: when someone's knowledge is disproportionately localized/siloed to their prospective subfield or domain of expertise, it does not necessitate generalization to others.

I'm certainly not saying this is the case with this particular individual, as I'm personally not familiar with their background. I'm simply stating that it's a plausible explanation for when experts in one domain make naive assertions about another domain they might not have the same experience in.

I don't buy it.

A guy designing and then implementing a programming language has a much bigger chance to put a lot of rational thinking into the tooling like dependency manager, than a typical language consumer, who can and often is easily falling into the languages emo wars.

> than a typical language consumer, who can and often is easily falling into the languages emo wars.

How is ginger bill excluded from this group? No one is more invested in a language than its creator(s).

Sure, he might have given it a lot of thought, but he came up with some completely bonkers conclusions. If you don't want dependencies, DON'T IMPORT DEPENDENCIES. Don't make your dependencies extremely hard to add.

Yeah when speaking about emotions: the amount of emo reactions here, including shouting with all caps, lets me think we've fallen into the old story: the author kind-of praised Go, but it's unfashionable here; the contrary, the fad here is to hate Go, so the author needed to get his hate. As simple as that. The rest is just trying to hide the hate under seemingly rational arguments.

Yawn.. saw it before...next, please

Yeah, god forbid you use bolding to emphasize your phrase on this site. It's considered emotinal response, but yours is purely logical?

I'm glad you saw through me like a Superman through a lead book. Which is to say, not at all. I wasn't even thinking of Go. Where did this come from? I never mentioned Go. I don't use it or know how it does its packaging.

Are you projecting your feelings onto me as a sort of substitute for the HN gestalt? The discussion was about package managers being evil.

Now please return to the topic at hand.

Let's say you have NPM package manager. What prevents you a rational individual from saying:

      {
         "depedencies": {}
      }