The dependency creep keeps on happening in web frameworks where ever you look.

I was thinking of this quote from the article:

> Take it or leave it, but the web is dynamic by nature. Most of the work is serializing and deserializing data between different systems, be it a database, Redis, external APIs, or template engines. Rust has one of the best (de)serialization libraries in my opinion: serde. And yet, due to the nature of safety in Rust, I’d find myself writing boilerplate code just to avoid calling .unwrap(). I’d get long chain calls of .ok_or followed by .map_err. I defined a dozen of custom error enums, some taking other enums, because you want to be able to handle errors properly, and your functions can’t just return any error.

I was thinking: This is so much easier in Haskell.

Rather than chains of `ok_or()` and `map_err()` you use the functor interface

Rust:

``` call_api("get_people").map_or("John Doe", |v| get_first_name(v)).map_or(0, |v| get_name_frequency(v)) ```

Haskell:

``` get_first_name . get_name_frequency <$> callApi "get_people" ```

It's just infinitely more readable and using the single `<$>` operator spares you an infinite number of `map_or` and `ok_or` and other error handling.

However, having experience in large commercial Haskell projects, I can tell you the web apps also suffer from the dreaded dependency explosion. I know of one person who got fired from a project due to no small fact that building the system he was presented with took > 24 hours when a full build was triggered, and this happened every week. He was on an older system, and the company failed to provide him with something newer, but ultimately it is a failing of the "everything and the kitchen sink" philosophy at play in dependency usage.

I don't have a good answer for this. I think aggressive dependency reduction and tracking transitive dependency lists is one step forward, but it's only a philosophy rather than a system.

Maybe the ridiculous answer is to go back to php.

user:	onyx228
created:	February 16, 2026
karma:	9