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Comment by ecares | Hacker News Reader

this one is actually a bad pattern to avoid.

If we were talking in the context of large TypeScript projects, you would be right. Central management helps the project avoid adding too many dependencies.

But you replied to a comment that said "for simple standalone tooling scripts in otherwise non-JS/TS projects" where this absolutely is not a bad pattern.

Only when you have no control over the version you're pulling in, but the semver resolution works as expected. Also we're talking about small standalone 'shell scripts', not 'real projects'. Think 'bla.sh', just with a .ts extension. Deno is really great for such small helper scripts.

> Also we're talking about small standalone 'shell scripts', not 'real projects'. Think 'bla.sh', just with a .ts extension. Deno is really great for such small helper scripts.

Okay. Now I'm confused and my head hurts. You want to randomly download dependencies for a "shell script" at the time of invocation?

I think I need to lie down.

Please explain what exactly is the problem with installing dependencies on demand compared to an 'npm install -g bla', 'brew install bla' or 'apt install bla'? It requires exactly the same amount of trust and is the the same thing under the hood, just that it happens automatically on first invocation of a script.

Then put shell function to your globals which will mimic install + run. It’s literally like 5 minutes of work max and you’ve spent way more arguing over it already.

Nobody says Deno is not better overall than Node. It clearly is, across the board. And nobody cares.

If Deno would provide actual improvements people would care about then for sure it would survive. The problem is that it didn’t. It was just fun project and creators learned a lot for sure. And entire js ecosystem improved thanks to Deno’s push.

It's not just about trust.

I wouldn't want a shell script to have side effects aside from its desired function.

On top of that, I wouldn't want a shell script that is being used for some task to have a runtime dependency on Internet connectivity, a registry being up, and/or the chance that a version of a dependency that is used is dependent upon when the artifact was first run.

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