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The linked Medium article (when talking about npm) was what I expected, but gives wonderful examples of just how bad it's gotten.

For those who don't want to dig, one example was Ember.js, which has a dependency called "glimmer" which makes up ~95% of the code size. The author looked into glimmer and found that it had the entirety of the Encyclopedia of Britannica's "G" section to include a definition of "glimmer" in their help menu.

And that wasn't even the most ridiculous example.

It's shameful that it's gotten this bad; but when you look at what people are expected of in the current climate it makes sense that this would happen.

   * Horrendously short deadlines for enterprise CRUD (and the "frameworks" that support it)
   * REUSE REUSE REUSE THIS REFUSE (few seem to know how to read source code before installing the dependency)
   * "Not paying me enough for that shit"
   * "We can't rewrite, we put 20 years into this codebase"
   * Even our languages are shit, JS (despite it's usefulness) has undefined behavior as a feature.
   * [among many others I'm sure you could think of]
It's toxic, corps incentivize lazy quick work that won't hold up in the long run, but they are too stupid to realize that. Though i blame more so the sycophant that just silently nods and does the work without a sliver of conscience telling them that "this is wrong".

Civility has a lesser place in efficiency then what we have now; you can't make a decent product without bashing a few skulls (figuratively ofc)

Lastly, don't be afraid to reinvent the wheel if your wheel is better than mine.



Unless I have misunderstood, I think the ember.js/Brittanica story is an amusing but untrue anecdote from a satire piece ( https://medium.com/s/silicon-satire/i-peeked-into-my-node-mo... ).


Not to burst your bubble but the linked Medium article you’re referring to is satire. Glimmer doesn’t actually pull in Britannica - it never has.


The sad state of affairs is that satire is dead and this guy fell for the bait. It doesn't even sound that ridiculous anymore.




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