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> 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 fin

> 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).

horsawlarway 9y ago
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.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  > 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.
- daliwali 9y ago
  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.

horsawlarway 9y ago

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.

khedoros1 9y ago
> 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.
daliwali 9y ago
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.