Continuing on the Practicality Beats Purity series, today we’re talking about modularity. While written with python in mind, the discussion here applies to any language that’s highly modular and with a large ecosystem.
As is touted frequently, python is quite famous for being a “batteries included” language with a vast ecosystem of modules and packages that provide almost every possible utility or function you’ll ever need. When building large applications, it’s a great idea to make use of this environment and not reinvent the wheel. This makes rapid development and prototyping real easy.
However, you must keep in mind that every new dependency added is one more variable that you have little to no control over. While you may not write the code yourself, there’s still cost incurred in keeping up with the most recent versions of your dependency and watching for security flaws and their respective fixes. It’s also important to pay attention to the size of the community around those dependencies, their interaction with other modules, responsiveness to reported bugs, and the size of supporting documentation both official (like read-the-docs) and unofficial (like stack overflow).
Following we discuss some of the costs.
Top comments (0)