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0 pointsbruce5111y ago0 comments

I'm _pretty_ sure it's satire, but the fact that you and I can't say for sure is perhaps illustrative of the failure.

I've encountered this pattern several times over my career. Some very smart programmer decides that for "reasons" the standard way to do something is "bad". (Usually "performance" or "bloat" are words bandied around.) They then happily architect a new system to replace the "old thing". Of course the new thing is completely undocumented (because genius programmers don't waste their time writing docs).

If you're _lucky_ the programmer then spends his whole career there maintaining the thing. If you're lucky the whole thing becomes obsolete and discarded before he retires. Hint: You're not lucky.

So what you are left with is this big ball of smoosh, with no documentation, that no-one can figure-out, much less understand. Oh he designed this before multi-core processors were a thing? Before we switched to a preemtive threaded OS? Well no, none of the code is thread-safe, and he's left the company so we need someone to "just update it".

There are reasons standard libraries exist. There are usually reasons they're a bit slower than hand-coding specific cases in assembler. There are reasons why they are "bloated" with support for lots of edge-cases. (like comments).

When some really smart person starts talking about how it's all rubbish, be afraid. Be very afraid.

0 comments

sumtechguy1y ago

> There are reasons standard libraries exist

That right there. Before there is a standard lib for something if there are N people coding something up there could be N! ways to do something.

If you do not know about a standard lib or it doesn't exist there will be some wild code written.

It is when that standard library shows up you should at least consider just throwing your bespoke code away. Not always but should at least be considered. I personally have replaced thousands of lines of code and modules I wrote just by switching them to some existing library. The upside is if that standard lib does not do what I want I have enough knowledge to either bend it around so it does or I can fix it up (or put my bespoke code back). I know I am not that smart, but I know enough that my code is probably brittle and probably should be thrown away.

Also watch out for some 'standard libs'. Some of them are little more than someone's hobby project and have all the exact same issues you are trying to avoid. One project I worked on some guy had written a grid control. He was charging something like 10k a year to use it. But it was just one guy and I quote "i just touch it once or twice a year and drink margaritas on the beach". It was a bug prone riddled mess we spent a non insignificant amount of time fixing. We bought another one for a onetime fee of 500 bucks and it was wildly faster and more importantly had near zero bugs and a turn around time of 1-2 days if we found one.