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It depends.

Lets step away from the front end for a second, on the server side you use a reasonble MVC framework.

* You get to stop worrying about how to structure your code.

* The guidence should use Depency Injection, allowing you to easily Unit Test.

* You get a templating language that helps with XSS.

* You get a validation language that helps with input.

* You get session handling that projects you against jacking, etc.

* You get an ORM that makes SQL easy and projects you against SQL Injection.

* You get Security Headers, etc.

Typically, the junior developer needs the above help, the mid level developer thinks they can do it all himself, and the senior doesn't think it's worth reinveting the wheel.

JavaScript has arguably been the wild west, and if you're creating a SPA, a lot of the above is no longer your consideration, but it alos doesn't neccessairly mean we should all write everything from scratch.

Now there are counter arguments where you can DIY your own framework using community modules, and this is how the Golang community seems to work, but this seems better when you have something like PHPs PSRs ala https://www.php-fig.org/ defining how this should fit together.

I'm not arguing that one should write things from scratch. I think I may have poorly articulated my position, but that you and I actually share the same opinion here.

I don't think you should reinvent the wheel unless for some reason all available wheels are insufficient for your case. But knowing this requires that you have some understanding of how wheels work, how to compare them, and how to hew your own out of raw materials if the need arises.

I would say JS is partially a wild west due to title inflation and the relative numbers of lesser experienced developers in the space relative to, say, your pool of Erlang engineers.

Yup. And it’s hard to even evaluate these things sometimes (and I have 20 years experience to guide me now).

We’re doing some frontend stuff at the moment and we needed a nice way to wire up keyboard shortcuts. After a week of false starts with other people’s libraries we wrote our own in a day that a) works how we need and b) is so small that anyone can understand it.

Yeah, fair enough. I agree, there is an over reliance on libs that often don't do much. :)

> I think this is true of a much larger category of developers than JS developers (though one could argue that defining yourself by a specific language is indicative of belonging to this category), that is developers who can't do more than plumbing, i.e. developers who can't actually solve problems properly on their own.

> The flighty attraction to the new shiny is somewhat driven by a lack of understanding of how either the new or the old shiny actually work. If you understand the job you're setting out to do you're in a much better position to decide upon tools, frameworks, what to do in house, etc.

I agree with this. Many developers never think to ask clients "why do you want to do this?" also. Sticking boxes together, cleaning up code and coming up with clever coding tricks is fun and distracting; it's easy to lose sight of or never even learn of what high-level problem you're meant to be solving.

>The flighty attraction to the new shiny is somewhat driven by a lack of understanding of how either the new or the old shiny actually work. If you understand the job you're setting out to do you're in a much better position to decide upon tools, frameworks, what to do in house, etc. If you don't you're stuck gluing black boxes together, because any actual code you write will be far worse.

Writing my own sort routine? Pointless but pretty harmless.

Writing my own docx parser? Sure, that will be one mythical man century of work.

Sometimes we are using black boxes because we have created so much accidental complexity that we can't do better than "this works, we don't know why and we dare not change it". The browsers js must target are some of the biggest black boxes even though they are open(ish) source.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with using black boxes, and I'm not arguing that it should be totally avoided. I'm arguing that a lack of understanding of how to solve your problem leads to only gluing black boxes together as you lack the understanding with which to make more nuanced decisions, and to solve any part of the problems you have yourself.

It's also not necessarily required that you understand all of what you're doing down to the logic gates, but if you don't (to crib your example) understand some of what docx parsing may entail, or can't actually write any sort function (nor understand how to compare them), you're stuck with black boxes at even the highest levels, and then you're very likely to be exposed to the article's defined fatigue as you continually jump to whatever looks shiniest, lacking the understanding with which to properly compare your options.

> Writing my own docx parser? Sure, that will be one mythical man century of work.

I'm not sure that's actually a great example. I had a project a while ago where I needed to extract certain information from Word and Excel files, and it was less work to just write my own parser (it's just XML in a ZIP file) that got exactly the information I needed than to figure out all the complexity of using a full-blown docx/xlsx parser. It ended up being 100 lines of Haskell, and half of that was imports.

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/duairc/db3e99a7808668e84e...

Edit: The docx part of it is only 10 lines of code.

That's a pretty neat trick.

There's a slight difference between extracting a few tags from an xml file and building an manipulable ast of it.

There is, but if your problem requires just the former, it's faster and better to build it yourself than to pull in a heavy third-party dependency (of which you'll use 1% anyway).

Yes but if it requires the latter you end up with an uncontrollable mess of regular expressions which can accidentally parse the language needed to summon the great elder ones.

The media wiki parser is a perfect example of what can go wrong with simple solutions.

> sort routine? docx parser?

You immediately went for two examples that are precisely not the kind of thing the author is talking about. Consider leftpad.