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> I understand competition is good in situations But also, consolidation at a given layer of an ecosystem allows that layer to be treated as a foundation so th

• bowsamic 4y ago
  I don't think always that's a good thing. Every ecosystem I've seen that happen in has just bred an army of lazy developers who rely on libraries for basically everything.
  • xxpor 4y ago
    That's not being lazy, it's being sane. Nothing's worse than screwing up something basic that should have been handled by a library. Leftpad might be on the too many libraries end, but that's an extreme example.
    • bowsamic 4y ago
      I don't agree with the assertion that programmers should defer programming to others whenever possible
      • vladvasiliu 4y ago
        I don't read it as "whenever possible", but rather "for non-trivial problems that have already been solved".
        • bowsamic 4y ago
          To me there is not much difference between that and "whenever possible"
        • xxpor 4y ago
          I'd agree with that. Of course, figuring out where the "non-trivial" line is is the hard part ;)
      • xxpor 4y ago
        As a programmer, your value prop/job/business isn't delivering code. It's solving business problems. If a library lets you do that faster, then it's a good idea. Flexing your ability to code has no place in the real world.
        • bowsamic 4y ago
          Are you saying that there is no value in honing your skills as a programmer?
          • orf 4y ago
            No. He’s saying that while another developer gets stuck in the weeds implementing their own byte-string library, he’ll be past that and shipping the feature that needs a byte-string implementation to the customer or end user. It’s the same reason you’re writing this using someone else’s web browser, on someone else’s kernel, on someone else’s hardware. And it’s not because you’re a bad/lazy programmer or because there’s no value in understanding how all of that works.
            • bowsamic 4y ago
              I don't (and won't ever) get it, sorry
              • orf 4y ago
                You do fully, 100% get it though. Because you utilise the labour of others every day with the knowledge that doing so allows you to achieve what you need to achieve, rather than spending all your time growing and harvesting corn or something.
              • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
                You write your own OS, web browser, etc?
              • bobbyskelton41 4y ago
                It's basic economics: gains from trade. It's more expensive to be entirely self-reliant.
    • lesuorac 4y ago
      The moral of story of leftpad should not have been people use too many dependencies. It should have been don't arbitrarily grab code from the web for your production apps. If you had any form of caching where a validated library (i.e. leftpad) would be used for your builds instead of just reaching out everytime then your system wouldn't break. Nor would a random cryptominer get into your app. -- Libraries should be a good thing in that it's definitely easier to review a line of code for a bug than write that same line bug-free. Of course, people (companies) rarely review the libraries they use (sometimes they physically/legally can't) so there are some outs.