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To restate my position using your terminology: I prefer programming (creating from scratch) to engineering (integrating) because the components that a software

To restate my position using your terminology: I prefer programming (creating from scratch) to engineering (integrating) because the components that a software engineer has to work with are so often unusable. To repeat a rant from an HN comment of a few weeks ago: I am working on a system involving Jetty, Postgres, and a connection pool. The first two components are pretty solid, and there is no shortage of Java connection pools to choose from. But getting them to all play together defeated me. Documentation for Jetty and for the connection pools is just terrible, and highly version specific. The APIs keep wiggling around as the versions change. I finally gave up on doing things the "right" way (configuring everything in XML), and also gave up on integrating a connection pool. I wrote my own very simple one.

joemi 10y ago
I don't really see how this means things are worse now than they used to be. You can still write things from scratch now (just as you did). But "back in the day" you had much more limited options for libraries, so you were not always able to glue stuff together, and often forced to write things from scratch. I'd argue that means it's better now than it used to be.
- geophile 10y ago
  It's a matter of expectations. Working on my own projects, I can rewrite and ignore existing software to my heart's content. If I am working with others, there is a very strong expectation that 3rd party software will be used whenever possible, and that I will participate in other engineering practices/fads that are judged to be beneficial. I don't mind doing things that have a good rationale for the problem at hand, but very often a team will do X because X is supposed to be a good thing to do. Cargo cult engineering, if you will.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    > It's a matter of expectations. Working on my own projects, I can rewrite and ignore existing software to my heart's content. If I am working with others, there is a very strong expectation that 3rd party software will be used whenever possible, and that I will participate in other engineering practices/fads that are judged to be beneficial Isn't that just part of 'being a professional' tho?
    - geophile 10y ago
      Being a "professional" means thinking. There is much unthinking adoption of the popular tools and approaches.
- sklogic 10y ago
  You cannot avoid using all those convoluted, unnecessary layers in many cases, even if you really want to. In JVM you're confined right on a top of a horrible pyramid. And in web it's even worse.

joemi 10y ago

I don't really see how this means things are worse now than they used to be. You can still write things from scratch now (just as you did). But "back in the day" you had much more limited options for libraries, so you were not always able to glue stuff together, and often forced to write things from scratch. I'd argue that means it's better now than it used to be.

geophile 10y ago
It's a matter of expectations. Working on my own projects, I can rewrite and ignore existing software to my heart's content. If I am working with others, there is a very strong expectation that 3rd party software will be used whenever possible, and that I will participate in other engineering practices/fads that are judged to be beneficial. I don't mind doing things that have a good rationale for the problem at hand, but very often a team will do X because X is supposed to be a good thing to do. Cargo cult engineering, if you will.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  > It's a matter of expectations. Working on my own projects, I can rewrite and ignore existing software to my heart's content. If I am working with others, there is a very strong expectation that 3rd party software will be used whenever possible, and that I will participate in other engineering practices/fads that are judged to be beneficial Isn't that just part of 'being a professional' tho?
  - geophile 10y ago
    Being a "professional" means thinking. There is much unthinking adoption of the popular tools and approaches.
sklogic 10y ago
You cannot avoid using all those convoluted, unnecessary layers in many cases, even if you really want to. In JVM you're confined right on a top of a horrible pyramid. And in web it's even worse.