venting, 'alternative' software dev
I'm really disappointed in a lot of the 'alternative' software circles (environmental sustainability, minimalism, etc.). They often seem to operate on belief systems not just for their values (which is fine!) but also for technical beliefs which are trivial to disprove, resulting in often severe compromises that just aren't necessary.
It's for the same reason that I'm baffled by people who talk about how we need to 'organize' and 'collaborate' and then in virtually the same breath complain about projects having 'too many dependencies'. Dependencies are just about the optimal tool for doing in software dev what you say we should be doing!
I don't know, this stuff is just exhausting to me. I've already spent too much energy having to debate against people's belief systems in ordinary software development to reduce harm, I don't want to have to do it in supposedly progressive circles too, to get anywhere near a solution.
I just want to get to systemic solutions as quickly as possible with as little collateral damage as possible, whatever the best strategy for that ends up being, through methodical analysis of the *full* problem space. Why is this such a difficult ask?
potentially uninformed Re: venting, 'alternative' software dev
@Ember So that's the thing, this isn't a problem in Node/JS either. It's an example of those "trivially disproven technical beliefs" - the vast majority of node_modules content isn't actually code, but stuff like documentation and bundled tests that could safely be removed if you wanted to (and even then 'gigabytes' is rare to begin with).
And it's actually even worse than that - anyone who has ever touched a bundler should already *know* this just from using the tools, because there is no other way to explain how a few hundred MB of files collapses into a 5MB .js file without any minification or code elimination steps.
re: potentially uninformed Re: venting, 'alternative' software dev
@joepie91 fair enough