Being Unopinionated

Published

A quick GitHub search will reveal that there's a lot of libraries and packages out there that brag about being unopinionated. I think that is a misnomer and instead all these libraries and packages are just differently-opinionated from the libraries/packages that they are alternatives for.

While it doesn't say so on their site, I feel like the original premise of turborepo was that it was an unopinionated monorepo manager. In reality, it just held different opinions about how tasks should be managed than tools like nx or lerna.

If you're looking at adopting some library or package (or even an SaaS application) and one of the main selling points is about it being unopinionated, don't fall for it!

It's fine for a library to express some opinions about how it should be adopted and how the overall workflow/application in which it is adopted should function. However, it's false advertising to say that it is unopinionated.