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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

> Code can be the solution. Good code even more so.

I think I agree with the author here. Code is a tool. This is like saying "a wrench can be the solution and a good wrench is even more valuable". I'm sure that car mechanics have very strong opinions about various wrenches. But I'm paying to get my car fixed. Sure, it's nice to hear that your shop has the latest equipment, but at the end of the day, the thing that matters most is that you can fix my car.

Even as a developer, I hardly care about the code quality or what language you use if you provide a good and reliable service. I've never thought to myself, geez, I love AWS, but I really wish they'd move away from Java.

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You would if their services crashed every day though right? Like when you pay to get your car fixed, there's an implicit expectation that it will be fixed well enough that it doesnt break the same way again for a certain amount of time, and it doesnt make anything else break.

If you found out that the garage was using wooden wrenches that broke 10% of the time and they passed that cost onto you, or occasionally broke and damaged the car, but didn't in your case, you wouldnt be like 'oh well, they fixed the problem, Ill keep going back to them'.

i'm trying to think of the coding equivalent of wooden wrenches? Let's say that's an app written entirely with VBA. If I perceive that it solves my problems, then for most use cases, i'd be fine with it. I guess if it's running my bank account or it's a platform for deploying my code, maybe i'd care somewhat, but in 99% of cases, i wouldn't.

But the reality is that most code is written in a language that's good enough. It's a metal wrench that might be showing some rust. Do I think that PHP is a good language to start a project with today? Of course not. Do I care if you wrote your site 15 years ago and it still runs on PHP? Not really.

maybe a better anology would be using the wrong tool to get something done. like you could use a high quality hammer to hammer a high quality screw into two pieces of wood, and it would probably hold them together, but you shouldn't. you could build an entire SPA in pure JavaScript...

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