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.

I have? Pray tell.

Have what? Heavily invested in language you're building? I think that's a given.

Not clear-headed about this? https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1nbkwzt/packag...

    > gingerbill[S] 1 point 2 hours ago
    >  So a tool that enables evil is not an evil tool?

See counterpoint: hammers, freezers, cars, arrows, guns, bombs, planes, etc. Each of them *can* enable evil. Same way a package manager *can* enable sprawling dependency list.

You see you just completely missed my replies to that too.

> Let's put it this way, what does a package manager specifically (not the other distinctions I make in the article) do (other than enable bad laziness and lack of proper vetting) that is actually good?

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1nbkwzt/packag...