Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna be That Other Other Guy and say....stuff like this is the reason why most programmers I meet take ages to do anything custom. Evey body uses this framework and that library and make bulky code that could actually be implemented with 2 far more efficient lines and will struggle when the need to customize presents itself. Learn Regex...you will have a crazy powerful weapon in your arsenal.

View on HN

Why is this being downvoted?

This is an excellent point. Petty substitutions like verbal expressions might be useful if you're just getting started, but ultimately it's a crutch and it's best just to learn pure regular expressions. They're not that difficult.

Same with bundling a ton of dependencies. Lots of people (especially contemporary programmers, primarily web developers) seem to be deathly afraid of writing custom code to handle a job. It's not "reinventing the wheel", it's implementing logic easily extensible within your application without the hassle of upstream, especially if you're only using a small portion of a library or framework. Using 15 libraries for a 600-line script isn't best practice, it's cowardice.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. If I see a junior developer trying to reinvent the wheel, he's probably going to build a pretty shitty wheel. The whole point of using dependencies isn't laziness or cowardice, it's leveraging others' work to save time, energy, and potential headaches caused by subpar custom implementations. Of course, that doesn't absolve us from learning the guts of our dependencies, but chastising developers for avoiding unnecessary work is absurd. The key is in learning when to import and when to DIY.

It really shouldn't have been downvoted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com