I think what he’s trying to say is that you, as a team, have to make that judgement for yourself, and then depending on how you feel perhaps look at the options he suggested.
I also agree with what has already been said that you really must carry out due diligence and ascertain for yourself how trustworthy a package might be either based on the code itself or how you feel about the author/team who wrote it.
I do think you make an interesting point about how communities differ tho, and again, aside from you having to make that judgement yourself I would like to add some thoughts.
-
In a way, we do have a type of community review process here as many library authors post their packages on the forum and you often get comments and suggestions from others. More recently, as the community has been growing, we’ve also added a ‘Seeking Feedback’ section as well as a Mentoring section for when people want to start sending PRs to established packages or tools. How many other language related forums/communities are continually adapting or have things like this? Is this ‘worth’ something to you and your team?
-
Something that might help you weigh things up is to look at community and culture as a whole. Perhaps specifically, the culture of learning. There’s no surprise why publishers like PragProg have released so many Elixir books - it’s because they sell. That means a lot of people are using professionally published ‘high quality’ resources to learn the language and the tooling around it. In fact as a community we go a step further. I’m sure you’ve no doubt noticed we have given away a lot of books here on the forum over the years and have often mentioned that even when you don’t win yourself - you still do - because that knowledge, even in the hands of others, helps go towards more informed Elixir developers which can lead to better libraries and tools, blog posts or even answers to questions on places like this very forum. There’s also another reason why these giveaways have, in my opinion, been highly beneficial, because many people entering them may not traditionally have been book readers or aware of just how valuable they are. I am a huge fan of professionally published books and naturally, when you value something so much you want to tell all your friends about it because you feel they can benefit too - and what better way to get people to appreciate the value of something than by giving them a taste of it! I have no doubt that our efforts have helped many people realise the benefit of high quality learning material and I have no doubt this has had a positive impact on the knowledge-base of the community.
So in answer to your question, yes, I personally feel more confident about the standard of Hex packages and the Elixir and Erlang community than I do about many other languages and eco-systems for all of the reasons above (and more!)… but like everyone has been saying, you need to make your own mind up about this.
