[nihiven]

This is really cool. It seems very 'pure' in comparison to what my code history will look like. In 2040, a lot of my code will show how I used a bunch of libraries and frameworks that nobody uses 'these days'. This doesn't seem good or bad, just a reflection of the times.

[swatcoder]

And unless you put in the effort to archive those dependencies yourself, nobody may be able to truly read or build your code anyway.

Today’s trendy development practices are shockingly ephemeral and fragile. Very little of today’s projects would survive one decade left fallow, let alone four.

[bluGill]

A few years back my office threw away a PC running Windows XP with no service packs. It was left in a closet for many years just in case we had to fix a bug in some safety critical code.

A few years ago we tried to rebuild some safety critical code from sometime back and were unable to because the certificates had expired and so the machine that can build the source code refused to connect to our version control system.

[capitol_]

This is why I really like Debians policy of being self-contained, that everything in Debian is built from sources that are in the Debian system.

It takes a lot more effort to package stuff, since you can't just download your dependencies from the internet. But you also create something that isn't as ephemeral.

[fallat]

> Today’s trendy development practices are shockingly ephemeral and fragile

My fellow human, you have just nailed what is wrong with today's software.

[xyst]

> And unless you put in the effort to archive those dependencies yourself

go makes this extremely easy to do

https://go.dev/ref/mod#go-mod-vendor

rust tool chain also includes a vendor dependency process

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-vendor.html

[dotancohen]

  > Very little of today’s projects would survive one decade left fallow, let alone four.

I hate to break it to you. 2040 is less than half as distant as you think it is.

[BobaFloutist]

I think that's somewhat the curse of technology. It's so hard to make anything from scratch. How do you get metallurgy working without already having metals? How do you get electricity running without an outlet, or at least powerful, easily sourced magnets?

Thinking about the "dependency tree" for any modern convenience is truly staggering. I can't even start to think about how you can make a factory without first having a factory.

[soulofmischief]

Checking dependencies into VCS should be more common as with yarn PnP and such.

[myth_drannon]

all these `pip install` and `npm install` will be useless

[myself248]

They already are, if your internet connection has a hiccup or worse.

They already are, if something has been hijacked and is now malicious.

They already are, if you need to install something offline somewhere.

They already are.