Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You sound very close to advocating a "Not invented here" approach. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here)

There are some rare cases where that makes sense (Keyword: RARE), but most times I've seen developers take that stance, it leads to longer development times, less consistent code, more maintenance work, and generally pretty shitty outcomes.

Popularity is ABSOLUTELY an indicator of things other than just popularity. However you need to understand why the thing is popular and vet that against your needs.

Finally: McDonalds IS good. I don't eat there often, but they provide a consistently satisfactory experience for their customers. There's a reason you can find McDonalds nearly everywhere on the planet.

It's popular to diss on companies that have become large iconic chains, but they're large iconic chains for a DAMN good reason. Plus, they're solving supply chain issues you aren't even considering, much like large popular libraries are handling use-cases and problems you don't even know about.

Can I make a better burger? Sure. Can I make a better burger for the same that McDonalds charges, as consistently as McDonalds does? Fuck no.

The same probably applies to your software.

> Finally: McDonalds IS good. I don't eat there often, but they provide a consistently satisfactory experience for their customers. There's a reason you can find McDonalds nearly everywhere on the planet.

McDonald's is consistent, predictable, cheap, generic, and ubiquitous. Sometimes those are good qualities. "Good enough" is usually good enough, after all.

Regionally, there are a half-dozen choices that I'll take over McD's: Less iconic world-wide, but as cheap or cheaper, just as consistent, and more pleasing to the palate. I think that's closer to what they were advocating: Not necessarily building it in-house, but also not taking popularity as a reliable indicator of code quality (beyond a bar of minimum acceptability).

If it hadn't been for the last sentence:

>At some point it would be easier to rewrite code from scratch with less complexity and overhead.

I'd agree, and probably wouldn't have commented.

But I think being all of these things:

>consistent, predictable, cheap, generic, and ubiquitous.

Means you have a damn good product. No one is claiming you can't get something better, but come on, I'd love to have software that's consistent, predictable, cheap, generic, and ubiquitous.

If those words describe a popular library, and you decide instead to build your own thing in-house... you better have a really REALLY good reason for doing it.

> Means you have a damn good product. No one is claiming you can't get something better, but come on, I'd love to have software that's consistent, predictable, cheap, generic, and ubiquitous.

Note that I never said "consistently good" or "predictably reliable". There are a lot of things in the world that are known to be low-quality, single-use crap that are still everywhere.

> If it hadn't been for the last sentence:[...]

I think it depends on their idea of where "at some point" lies.

I'd settle for consistent, predictable, and cheap. Generic doesn't matter if it solves my specific problem and ubiquity is a social problem. Enterprise pays a lot for bespoke solutions as well.

A very good reason to write your own software is if the problem is novel enough to warrant it. I'm not advocating that there should be n+1 JSON serialization libraries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com