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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

I hate to come across as elitist or something—noone's perfect, and I appreciate people building software libraries & releasing them, regardless of their experience as a programmer.

But if someone's publishing a HTML templating system, and they don't have enough knowledge about HTML to understand the need for contextual escaping, I would have grave concerns about the Dunning-Kruger effect & the quality of any software that engineer writes.

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Dunning-Kruger effect seems like a weird accusation to throw here. The whole basis of it is "a false sense of superiority", but the author is clearly willing to engage on this issue.

I think a better way of terming this would be that you have concern the the author might not have enough domain expertise, which is very different than being incompetent.

This gives me pause that Maud isn't right for a production system at this time, but is that so surprising for a 0.11 library?

I suppose one does gain good experience and knowledge if one is receptive to feedback during the developing & maturing of a software project, so that is positive.

I guess what I was more getting at was the thought process that goes "I'm going to develop and release a library in X domain", when ones knowledge of said domain is low. And then launching said library before one has really gained a lot of knowledge of that domain.

I might be biased, as I'm the engineer that you're talking about, but that characterization feels unfair. Context-aware escaping is by no means common in the open source world—just look at Jinja or Handlebars. So unless you're knee-deep in an ecosystem that embraces it, it's easy to brush it off as unimportant.

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