"A little copying is better than a little dependency."
this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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Judgement call. When it's something prone to change that's hard to get right, duplicating it just creates more maintenance burden.
For sure. But I've seen a lot more sins committed in the name of reusing code than in the name of minimizing dependencies.
Depend on abstractions. This isn't hard. 🤷
When I do a security audit on apps with hundreds of dependencies, I die a little bit
Does it matter what kind of dependancy? Like, sure, if it's somebody's 5-year-old school project that's bad, I guess. (I'm experiencing this meme right now)
Reuse is only good in the context of 90s era OO programming wisdom of "Coupling is bad, cohesion is good".
Wait so I should reinvent the wheel constantly! I knew I was right about that!!
I also think an implementation should depend on how many the developer remembers to change
Another level of this dilemma:
- Pin all dependency versions – Prevents receiving security patches
- Don’t pin dependency versions – Enables supply chain attacks (see https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/03/incident-report-cve-2024-yikes.html)