Comment by ontouchstart
1 month ago
I did a toy experiment on a pretty low level crate (serde) in Rust ecosystem, to run a simple demonstration from their website pulling in 42M of dependencies.
https://wtfm-rs.github.io/wtfm-serde/doc/wtfm_serde/
I know this is orders of magnitude smaller than npm or pip, but if this is the best we can get 50 years since 70s UNIX on PDP-11, we are doomed.
It amazes me how much we've embraced dependency hell. Surely we need some dependencies but certainly we're going overboard.
On a side note, I wonder how much of this is due to the avoidance of abstraction. I hear so many say that the biggest use they get from LLMs is avoiding repetition. But I don't quite understand this, as repetition implies poor coding. I also don't understand why there's such a strong reaction against abstraction. Of course, there is such a thing as too much abstraction and this should be avoided, but code, by its very nature, is abstraction. It feels much like how people turned Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" from "grab a profiler before you optimize you idiot" to "optimization is to be avoided at all costs".
Part of my questioning here is that as the barriers to entry are lowered do these kinds of gross mischaracterizations become more prevalent? Seems like there is a real dark side to lowering the barrier to entry. Just as we see in any social setting (like any subreddit or even HN) that as the population grows the culture changes significantly, and almost always to be towards the novice. For example, it seems that on HN we can't even make the assumption that a given user is a programmer. I'm glad we're opening up (as I'm glad we make barriers to entry lower), but "why are you here if you don't want to learn the details?" How do we lower barriers and increase openness without killing the wizards and letting the novices rule?