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Comment by socalgal2

I'm curious if rust has this problem. The problem I notice in npm land is many developers have no taste. Example, there's a library for globbing call glob. You'd think it would just be a function that does globbing but no, the author decided it should ALSO be a standalone commandline executable and so includes a large commandline option parser. They could have easily made a separate commandline tool that include a library that does the glob but no, this is a common and shit pattern in npm. I'd say easily 25% or more of all "your dependencies are out of date" messages are related to the argument parcing for the commandline tool in these libraries. That's just one example.

Also there's arguably design. Should a 'glob' library actually read the file system and give you filenames or should it just tell you if a string matches a glob and leave the reset to you? I think it's better design to do the later, the simplest thing. This means less dependencies and more flexibility. I don't have to hack it or add option to use my own file system (like for testing). I can use it with a change monitoring system, etc...

And, I'm sure there are tons of devs that like the glob is a "Do everything for me" library instead of a "do one specific thing" library which makes it worse because you get more "internet points" the more your library doesn't require the person using it to be a good dev.

I can't imagine it's any different in rust land, except maybe for the executable thing. There's just too many devs and all of them, including myself, don't always make the best choices.

parent socalgal2 1 year ago

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