Comment by dragonsky67 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonsky67 | Hacker News Reader

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And that is all good if the developer is qualified and has time to review your work.

Far easier to use something that 1000's of others are using as well. Far more likely for edge case bugs to surface.

That said, I have to agree that it can be painful trying to get one of those edge case bugs resolved if you are the only one being impacted. In this case I may be worth just implementing your own functionality and swallowing the future support. But I think it's got to be a backup plan, not your first response.

The real problem is that most developers don't have the experience or knowledge to go beyond accepting the "use xyz library" suggestion on Stack Overflow on face value, not having the ability to review xyz library for suitability. We end up with lots of code that is just collections of dependencies where only a very small % of functionality is used and no resources are put into ensuring that using the dependency is not introducing more problems than they solve.

> And that is all good if the developer is qualified and has time to review your work.

That's me. I'm the person that most often needs to go back into my code, six months later. I write code that I want to use, and that I want to see, months afterwards. I actually don't give a damn if I never get a single star on my repos. In fact, the fewer people that use it, the better. I still write every library as if it will be used by first responders, as I have pretty high standards.

I'm also insane about testing. If you look at those repos, you'll see that the testing code (either unit, or harness), far outweighs the code under test. Most of my test harnesses are App Store-ready full-fat applications, with localization, and documentation.

But I am not reinventing Facebook. I write end-user native apps for Apple systems. I don't have the same needs as someone writing a massive social media server.

Like I said, I do what I do, and it works for me. Your mileage may vary.

> Far easier to use something that 1000's of others are using as well. Far more likely for edge case bugs to surface.

Dunno, I feel this tends to drive a lot of complexity. A lot of canned solution are comically over-engineered and break fairly frequently (especially in the cloud-adjacent space for some reason). Often the code needed to integrate such a library and make it do what you need it to do may exceed the code of just doing it yourself in the first place.

What happened with Log4j also should be a lesson in why adopting needlessly complex standard solutions to problems that don't really need them is deeply problematic. Most of its users would probably have been served fairly well with a thin wrapper for sysout, possibly with a json-serializer.

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