Winners Take All in the Dependency World (or Hell) | /en/2018/11/dependency-winner/

The third difficult thing in computer science - to introduce or not to introduce a dependency?

Sometimes it takes more effort to find the library/read the docs than to write a function on one's own, but if the library is well-maintained, then hopefully it will be more bug-free (tho there is always a problem when the library has breaking updates).

Guest *Jiaming Shen* @ 2018-11-11 11:05:29 originally posted:

Thanks for recommendation package "helpr", however, seems it neither available from CRAN(has been removed! ) nor in github. Error message is not available for (R=3.5.1 ). The intuitively guess is that because of so much dependencies, one of it out-of-date, may cause the package not available?

Guest *Miles McBain* @ 2018-11-12 03:51:47 originally posted:

Thanks for the kind words about my package Yuihi. It's funny, I had written it off as junk, but you and Romain have me looking at it in a different light.

I was sold by glue in Jim's User2018 talk where he made the point that apart from having no dependencies itself, glue is a dependency of tidyverse. So it is in all likelihood already installed on your end user's machine. It's hard to argue with that!

On the subject of winner takes all: The ancient open source curse 'May your project have many users.' comes to mind. One of my favourite software tools has 16k GitHub stars, and 2k issues. Terrifying.

Guest *Mara* @ 2018-11-12 12:40:59 originally posted:

marketing more or less depends on how loud you can shout out and whether you are able to keep raising your voice in a room that has already been fairly loud

I somewhat disagree with this. In fact, were this the case, the whole world would resemble Times Square. In Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants," he discusses the phenomenon of "conditioned indifference," wherein we (the masses) learn to effectively ignore "noise" (basically an "attention merchant's" version of habituation). In fact, humans seem to have a sort of built-in aversion to marketing when it feels synthetic, which is why Derek Thompson in his book, "Hit Makers," argues that many of the pehnomena we describe as "viral" actually follow different "infectious models" that are less-easily perceived.

Anyway, I digress. I definitely take your point, but, at the same time, I think there's a tendency to imagine a platonic ideal of meritocracy in the absence of something we call "marketing," which (in reality) doesn't really exist. I suppose that depends on how one defines marketing — but I feel like there's a tendency to write off shared enthusiasm as being something nefarious.

Guest *Hadley Wickham* @ 2018-11-13 14:20:53 originally posted:

I think I must disagree with your definition of marketing, because I think you do a lot of it! From my perspective, some of your recent marketing initiatives are:

• The bookdown website listing all the books created with it.
• The bookdown competition.
• Having a blog where you talk about your work (and deliberately not promoting it via twitter!).
• Making the bookdown and blogdown books available for free.

I think you discount the importance of marketing because you are so good at it.