By far the most popular npm package I’ve ever written is blob-util, which is ~10 years old and still gets 5+ million weekly downloads. It’s a small collection of utilities for working w…
  • Rokin@leminal.space
    26·
    1 day ago

    I feel like there is always more open source code to write. If not for practical reasons, then for experimental, educational or just humorous values.

    • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
      46·
      1 day ago

      If noþing else, new programming languages are always being invented, and sooner or later a new ones becomes a fad and a bunch of people re-implement old tools in new languages.

      It’s þe true circle of FOSS life.

    • verdeco@programming.dev
      223·
      1 day ago

      Yes it’s called experiential value, like an artist doing sketches, developers sketch their program. Open Source is not meant for production use. The industrial software library development should be done by professional software engineering companies in a socially responsible way.

      • mech@feddit.org
        8·
        1 day ago

        Open Source is not meant for production use.

        The Microsoft Azure backend runs on Linux servers.
        Your phone, router and all your networking hardware run on Linux or BSD.
        Can you guess what’s the back-end of VMWare? Veeam? FortiGate?

      • lad@programming.devEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        The industrial software library development should be done by professional software engineering companies in a socially responsible way.

        That would maybe be nice in theory, except nobody wants to pay, so this would be both terrible and limiting in practice

        • verdeco@programming.dev
          114·
          1 day ago

          That would maybe be nice in theory, except nobody

          Everybody wants to pay, nobody is giving them a chance to by providing sound means, trying to sell open source charity instead which the legal departments absolutely hates. It’s not true that businesses don’t want to pay, what they don’t want is to donate. These are very different things.

            • verdeco@programming.dev
              110·
              1 day ago

              LOL yes let’s listen to a person who read a stupid opinion (im not saying you are stupid) on the internet and now propagates it everywhere he sees the “open source” keyword. If you read by comment i’m explicitly talking about software libraries, the only support you get for libraries is documentation. nobody listen to me nobody is selling support for small libraries which is what this post is about, on any meaningful level. prove me wrong

  • calliope@retrolemmy.com
    15·
    1 day ago

    Does this guy know that a lot of people open-source code so that it might be useful for other people?

    Not numbers of downloads or hoping to gain popularity, but to literally help the community.

    I read other people’s open source code all the time to try and understand things. I can’t be the only one.

    What a strange article. Can I not “pin” his repo at a specific version in my project, thus making it a stable dependency? If it’s small and readable, that’s just as good as writing it yourself. What is dying?

    • iii@mander.xyzEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      so that it might be useful for other people?

      Even that isn’t necessary. I do it because I want to share cool things, even if they’re not useful. The world didn’t need another crossword puzzle creator, I just felt like writing one.

      • calliope@retrolemmy.com
        2·
        10 hours ago

        Absolutely, “useful” is a broad term in this case.

        It is always interesting to see how people implement things!

  • henfredemars@lemdro.idEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    Why do people buy organic fruits and vegetables?

    I care about where the code comes from. I like the community to come together on a good solution rather than have one spat out of unknown quality. I want to both test and have that community working together towards a common goal. Fundamentally, I think that sharing our answers and cataloguing them as developers is a good strategy. Way better than AI.

    If AI is ultimately borrowing its answers from open source, wouldn’t it be better to just go use open source? At least then there’s some hope that if people find issues and edge cases that I might get those fixes in the future. Why limit your upside to zero? Like, I can put my entire program in one source file maintained by just me but it doesn’t mean I should. Is this an argument against why libraries are a good idea?

  • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I am not much of a Javascript developer; I write mostly Python. And python is famously very much “batteries included”, so these “small” libraries are part of the standard library. I never look at the details unless something has gone quite wrong. I suspect very few people use such libraries as learning opportunities in JS either; they just add it to packages.json and never look back. So I don’t think the loss the author talks about is that big a deal.

    If people genuinely take this approach though I think you miss out on collective problem solving. A dependency is a risk, yes, but it’s also an opportunity for other people to have found the bugs that you no longer have to suffer.