On Modern Web Applications Stability
emadelsaid.com
On Modern Web Applications Stability
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#2Definitely some issues raised in the article and particularly the idea that even if you need a little bit of something, you inherit the entire library with dependencies you don't need!
However it is a little short on solutions. The truth is that I don't want to write my own PayPal API when there is one that PayPal produce and are likely to keep more up-to-date than me. Writing my own means that I only rely on my team but it is a big overhead for any reasonable size company that use dependencies from possibly 20+ major libraries and the hundreds of lower-level dependencies.
What would be cool would be a webpack style dependency manager that can remove things you don't use and then only show you updates for the bits you do.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#3Of course, the other side to this coin is assuming that you can do better than the folks who have specialized in solving particular problems, and open-sourcing their solutions.
I'm not arguing that package bloat is a good thing, but I do think it's an acceptable trade-off for the speed and functionality improvements.
If long-term stability is a very high priority for your project, you should look at using the right tools for that job. A language like Clojure that actively seeks to avoid "churn" while operating on top of common runtimes is a good choice for things like that. There's no need to compromise on speed of development, either :)
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#4Definitely some issues raised in the article and particularly the idea that even if you need a little bit of something, you inherit the entire library with dependencies you don't need! However it is a little short on solutions. The truth is that I don't want to write my own PayPal API when there is one that PayPal produce and are likely to keep more up-to-date than me. Writing my own means that I only rely on my team…
I use the `npm-check` [0] to help me with that problem. Might not check all of your boxes, but it certainly helps me manage dependencies in my JS projects!
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#5This article mentions node dependencies and ignores the innumerable number of libraries down the stack to the bare metal. Even if you wanted to spend the time writing your application without using any libraries you still must have some level of trust on the platform you are running on.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#6I don't buy it. I mean the entire society is set up this way. If we tried to reduce reliance on others and others systems, are we saying we should all build our own operating systems that are hardened from solar radiation?
About one week ago I woke up to my great uncle knocking on my RV (we live in his driveway temporarily) and he said, the fastest moving fire in CA history is moving toward Paradise again and we need to get ready to evacuate. We had no electricity and so updates were bad. Later he updated us after driving to the top of the hill that the fire was 40 miles away. Later that day I found out he was wrong, it was 10 miles away :P. The sky was red, the world had stopped, everything was hopeless.
I went to gas up the RV, hundreds of people doing the same, all scrambling trying to avoid a repeat of mistakes from 2 years ago. Everything is nuts, no one is calm.
Except the world didn't stop. Mail was delivered in Magalia and Paradise that very day. UPS and Fedex dropped off packages in both cities that very day. The world is actually a lot more robust that we give it credit. Sure, maybe we are constantly 2 minutes to midnight. But maybe, just maybe this modern society can handle pandemics. I know the literature is saying the exact opposite. And maybe in a year we're all going to be starving to death. But if that's the case, then the least of my worries is how many dependencies I have. If anything, if I have more, perhaps we're strengthening our society just a little by paying 5 SAAS companies to keep mine running.
Just tying it back to my fire experience, I depend on daily, so many freaking companies and people, ACTUALLY doing stuff that day, that I don't care that my code is resting on the backs of 4000 developers I haven't met, that haven't touched 90% of that code in 3-4 years anyway.
Not saying I wouldn't enjoy a completely different society, but that's a different essay.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#7Definitely some issues raised in the article and particularly the idea that even if you need a little bit of something, you inherit the entire library with dependencies you don't need! However it is a little short on solutions. The truth is that I don't want to write my own PayPal API when there is one that PayPal produce and are likely to keep more up-to-date than me. Writing my own means that I only rely on my team…
It seems like "the hundreds of lower-level dependencies" is a problem that is unique to JavaScript due to its lack of a standard library.
JavaScript has a huge ecosystem, and as a result produces many new, interesting ideas, but its also the source of a lot of churn.
I remember working on large-ish (+300k LoC) .Net applications that were essentially dependent on just the .Net Framework itself.
For those looking to prioritize stability, the "solution" would probably be to avoid Node.js based applications altogether.
Use something like JavaScript/Node.js where it makes sense, in the front-end, and for developing thin API layers to support your front-ends. For heavy lifting (data and complex business logic) look towards languages/tools that prioritize stability.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#8I don't know what author is trying to say here. Should I develop everything from scratch and myself? I would actually recommend opposite.. look what you can buy before deciding to build it yourself(considering a lot of factors).
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#9Reminds me of this movie illustration the complexity and human collaboration required to produce a pencil: https://youtu.be/IYO3tOqDISE (6:33 in total; it’s a bit “dreamy” sometimes but still worth a watch, you can skip the first minute).
Basically entire human civilization is based on collaboration, learning from and relying on each other (among other things). The process kickstarted with developments in agriculture, freeing up Human Resources to work on other things. We’ve been perfecting this for a few thousand years, of which we’ve been automating things using software for only 50 years (being generous here). Give it some time - with the current rate of development we may not need another thousand years to improve software development to near perfection as well ;-)
(Or more pessimistically: there’s still a lot of hunger in this world so even after a few thousand years we’ve not even perfected the most basic of human needs - doesn’t bode well for something as fancy as the typical glorified beans counter that is most enterprise software...)
Disclaimer: This video is typically used as a pro free markets argument to illustrate the level of cooperation required to produce even the simplest things, arguing that such collaboration is only possible by free actors in a free market - that’s not the point here but still interesting tangent to think about in this context.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#10I love this recent xkcd about Depedency: https://xkcd.com/2347/