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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

> Create libraries that aim to do one thing and do it well.

That's nice and all, but once you combine that with giving them descriptive names, you're going to have a list of hard-to-distinguish projects like:

- css-min

- css-polyfill

- css-inline-min

- css-inline-polyfill

- css-script-min

- css-script-polyfill

- etc.

Good luck clarifying what you're talking about. And of course, people will start using acronyms for all of them, and now you're back at cryptical names, with the added benefit of all the names sounding and looking similar. Or, of course, have inaccurate or inconsistent names.

And then I didn't even get to the part where your categorisation turns out to not match the eventual scope, and they'll need to be split into css-server-min, css-client-min, etc.

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And then someone makes a package to combine all of them, and then someone makes a package that combines that combining package with another combining package, and then the author of `css-script-polyfill` deletes the repo, and we're dealing with another leftpad

https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-...

I can't be the only one that just includes any dependency with a permissive license? `git subtree` is so ridiculously easy for the larger dependencies and 90% of these projects are sub-500 lines in a single file, just include them.

> you're going to have a list of hard-to-distinguish projects like:

What's hard to distinguish? These are projects that do something with CSS. If you don't need css, you skip them. If you need a polyfill, you only look at polyfill ones to see what you need.

Now, let's imagine your list is "creatively" named like

- shelob

- arcana

- custard

- escalope

- virtuocsso

- jester-css

- etc.

Ah yes, this is so much easier to distinguish, isn't it?

They're hard to distinguish in the sense that a colleague might ask something like "hey can you publish a new version of css-script-min" and you accidentally publish a new version of "css-min" or "css-inline-min" or whatever instead.

That's such a minuscule problem compared to trying to figure out which of the insane names is the one you need.

A name is usually not enough to determine which library/framework is best for you. This is the _illusion of transparency_ that the author talks about. How would you rename React and Angular such that developers could tell at a glance which one to use? If it's going to require further investigation from the user's part, better to give the project an opaque name to make it clear that further investigation is necessary.

when I'm looking for a css minifier, I sure as hell don't want to wade through weirdly names projects that "require further investigation".

And definitiely not inside the company I work at

Edit "And I will never know love because of Galactus" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

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