Software ecology
Package manages like npm, conda/pip and dependencies in general are the new fossil fuels. They let us rapidly go forward and they will be the end of us. If we don't pay attention to our solutions' dependency trees and their depths, what we're deploying is mostly pollution even if serves the moment's business purpose.
For a long time it's not hardware anymore. The moment we hit the Moore's limit, instead of actually addressing the problem, we went the usual enterprise way of ignoring the problem and "just put your SAP into an all-memory system". Because it's hard accepting that we're writing software in languages that are single-core in their design and philosophy.
We don't need supercomplex CPUs with speculative execution.
We need languages/paradigms that produce code which naturally scales to all available cores (which don't need to be in the same CPU or even colocated hardware).
It's not trivial for a compiler/runtime to make multicore-ready simple (i=0; i<100; i++) { sum +=i+1 }
while seq(0, 100).map(i=> i+1).sum() is.
Software ecology is a call to software engineers to learn from mistakes humanity made against our own planet and start treating software solutions like we start (hopefully) treating our planet - reduce the pollution footprint, reduce energy consumption, build sustainable and long term.
There are two main points about the change:
- Switch to rational use of dependencies (TBD). This is the reduce pollution part of ecology.
- Switch to new ways of developing scalable software (TBD). This is the switch to environment-friendly energy sources part of ecology.
The TBD part is why this initiative exists.
Software ecology is not about abandoning libraries and frameworks. It's about developing a culture of asking questions in a form of "Do I really need ...?" For example
Do I really need javascript to implement a checkbox?
Do I really need complex CSS engine?
Do I really need web-scale no-sql database?
Do I really need this memory cache product as an ad hoc message bus?
Do I really need kubernetes to host a website?