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Comment by hsn915 | Hacker News Reader

> My day becomes selecting libraries, integrating them, and testing integration.

This is why I hate modern programming.

When was the last time you had a job where you could actually learn how to actually program something? The prolifiration of libraries means that all your bosses and managers would extremely frown upon anyone handrolling a solution instead of using an existing library.

Which means the more time you spend at a regular job, the worse your brain will rot.

Just talk to any programmer at any company and you will notice that almost none of them know how to program anything. They just know how to stitch together libraries with some glue code.

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> The prolifiration of libraries means that all your bosses and managers would extremely frown upon anyone handrolling a solution instead of using an existing library.

They are right, even if you do not agree. Handrolling is incredibly cost ineffective, yet another source of bugs and can be seen as a bad idea when it comes to security.

Huge third party libraries like LibOgg are maintained by gigantic industry players. Chances are, they are more knowledgeable in that specific domain than you are and they can focus more developer time on what is just a small part in your business application.

How many of the people who are working on any given library actually are domain expert on the subject matter as you imagine?

This might have been true 20 years ago. But now the cultural shift affects even the people who work on the lower levels.

A sort of famous example is how slow Visual Studio has gotten compared to 20 years ago (when it was running on slower hardware even!) where it was nearly instant.

The refterm saga has demonstrated that people employed by Microsoft and paid very high salaries to work on a terminal emulator have no idea how to make a half decent terminal renderer.

> handrolling is incredibly cost ineffective, yet another source of bugs and can be seen as a bad idea when it comes to security.

Without context this statement is blatantly false.

Many libraries are full of bugs and security problems.

I find this comment amusing because most tasks the GP mentions are so specialized that you wouldn't actually have time to learn them. If your complaint is left pad and similar libraries, that's not what GP comment is talking about.

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