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Dependency

Dependency of a piece of technology is another piece of technology that's required for the former to work (typically e.g. a software library that's required by given computer program). Dependencies are bad! Among programmers the term dependency hell refers to a very common situation of having to deal with the headaches of managing dependencies. Unfortunately dependencies are also unavoidable. We at least try to minimize dependencies as much as possible while keeping our program functioning as intended, and those we can't avoid we try to abstract (see portability) in order to be able to quickly drop-in replace them with alternatives.

Having many dependencies is a sign of bloat and bad design. Unfortunately this is the reality of mainstream programming. For example at the time of writing this Chromium in Debian requires (recursively) 395 packages LMAO xD And these are just runtime dependencies...

In software development context we usually talk about software dependencies, typically libraries and other software packages. However, there are many other types of dependencies we need to consider when striving for the best programs. Let us list just some of the possible types:

Good program will take into account all kinds of these dependencies and try to minimize them to offer freedom, stability and safety while keeping its functionality or reducing it only very little.

Why are dependencies so bad? Because your program is for example:

How to Avoid Them

TODO


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