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>...pattern match whatever problem... I agree with your comment. I would add that there are cases where your problem looks really easy right now, but will get

>...pattern match whatever problem... I agree with your comment. I would add that there are cases where your problem looks really easy right now, but will get increasingly complicated over time in ways you don't expect. In this case, "overkill" 3rd party solutions are actually better. For example, you could write an HTTP client using sockets pretty easily, and it will work in simple cases. But you will, over time, run into edge cases and problems that a mature library has already solved for you. Also, this problem reminds me of having to decide whether to solve the integral, or look it up, back in the day. Solving from scratch was always preferable if you could do it, but sometimes it was just too hard.

kd5bjo 7y ago
> But you will, over time, run into edge cases and problems that a mature library has already solved for It’s entirely possible that the new problems you encounter will be different than the ones the mature library was designed to address, and then you end up hacking around solutions to problems you don’t have in order to fix the ones you do.
inlined 7y ago
I actually did have to write an HTTP library on sockets once. It wasn’t trivial (took a month to productionize), but it was core to our business. We were writing developer tools (Parse) and our file upload library had major problems on the latest iPhone due to an OS bug (if a kernel buffer filled before the modem could upload it, the file transfer would fail). We became the third company I know about to ever solve this problem, but I had built what my colleague called “the hardest to use HTTP library ever”. I was happy to move back to AFNetworking once we could do so without a regression in performance or hitting that bug.