Try to say that at job interview if you don't believe

Imo there's an identifiable core common to all of these kinds of package managers, and it's not terribly hard to work out a reasonably good hierarchical ontology. I think OP's greater insight in this section is that internally, every package manager has its own ontology with its own semantics and lexicon:

> Even within a single ecosystem, the naming is contested: is the unit a package, a module, a crate, a distribution? These aren’t synonyms. They encode different assumptions about what gets versioned, what gets published, and what gets installed.

I found Eelco Dolstra‘a doctoral thesis (https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf) to be a great read and it certainly doesn’t paint the picture of a wicked problem.

For tree reversal in particular, it shouldn't be any harder than:

1. If you don't know what a binary tree is then ask the interviewer (you probably _ought_ to know that Google asks you questions about those since their interview packet tells you as much, but let's assume you wanted to wing it instead).

2. Spend 5-10min exploring what that means with some small trees.

3. Then start somewhere and ask what needs to change. Clearly the bigger data needs to go left, and the smaller data needs to go right (using an ascending tree as whatever small example you're working on).

4. Examine what's left, and see what's out of order. Oh, interesting, I again need to swap left and right on this node. And this one. And this one.

5. Wait, does that actually work? Do I just swap left/right at every node? <5-10min of frantically trying to prove that to yourself in an interview>

6. Throw together the 1-5 lines of code implementing the algorithm.

It's a fizzbuzz problem, not a LeetCode Hard. Even with significant evidence to the contrary, I'd be skeptical of their potential next 1-3 years of SWE performance with just that interview to go off of.

That said, do they actually know that was the issue? With 4+ interviews I wouldn't ordinarily reject somebody just because of one algorithms brain-fart. As the interviewer I'd pivot to another question to try to get evidence of positive abilities, and as the hiring manager I'd consider strong evidence of positive abilities from other interviews much more highly than this one lack of evidence. My understanding is that Google (at least from their published performance research) behaves similarly.

Supply chain vulnerabilities are a choice. It's a problem you have to opt in to.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008744>

Certainly Go is a more rigorous language than say JavaScript but it’s package mangement was abysmal for years. It’s not even all the great now.

C/C++ is the same deal. The way it handles anything resembling packages is quite dated (though I think Conan has attempted to solve at least some of this)

I think Cargo and others have the hindsight of their peers, rather than it being due to any rigorous attribution of the language

I hate package management so much. I hate installing unnecessary cruft to get a box with what I want on it.

It makes me pine for tarballs built on boxes w/ compilers installed and deployed directly onto the filesystem of the target machines.

Edit: I'd love to see package management abstracted to a set of interfaces so I could use my OS package manager for all of the bespoke package management that every programming language seems hell-bent on re-implementing.