> Software needs to be a little more self-contained. Software reuse these days is honestly taking “not reinventing the wheel” to lazy extremes.
The three cardinal virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. I've never seen a decent argument against using ever-smaller libraries (as long as our dependency management is good enough to track them); all of the usual arguments for reusing libraries still apply, even if we take them further than their originators imagined.
> System package management systems do things just fine. Ask yourself, “when did I last properly package a Debian library? Do I even know how to do it properly?” Most people won’t be able to answer that because they didn’t.
Well, as we're seeing, Debian is struggling to keep up with packaging of everything that users want. I have actually created some (unofficial) debian packages; it's fine, but it's not a particularly inspiring experience either. Creating a maven/pip/... package is generally a nicer experience.
> But truth be told, having each programming language a unique package manager sucks. I’d rather have a consistent way of managing packages on a given system so that I can use various programming languages.
In principle I agree. But I'd definitely need to be able to install independent copies of the same library, different packages for different users, and fundamentally just have a nice development experience when working on that package manager. And that's not something I see the sysadmin tradition being able to come up with.
The three cardinal virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. I've never seen a decent argument against using ever-smaller libraries (as long as our dependency management is good enough to track them); all of the usual arguments for reusing libraries still apply, even if we take them further than their originators imagined.
> System package management systems do things just fine. Ask yourself, “when did I last properly package a Debian library? Do I even know how to do it properly?” Most people won’t be able to answer that because they didn’t.
Well, as we're seeing, Debian is struggling to keep up with packaging of everything that users want. I have actually created some (unofficial) debian packages; it's fine, but it's not a particularly inspiring experience either. Creating a maven/pip/... package is generally a nicer experience.
> But truth be told, having each programming language a unique package manager sucks. I’d rather have a consistent way of managing packages on a given system so that I can use various programming languages.
In principle I agree. But I'd definitely need to be able to install independent copies of the same library, different packages for different users, and fundamentally just have a nice development experience when working on that package manager. And that's not something I see the sysadmin tradition being able to come up with.