> Your solution to hitting a bug in a tool If only it were "a bug". Rather, there was a steady trickle of post-mortems for production issues which couldn't be

> Your solution to hitting a bug in a tool If only it were "a bug". Rather, there was a steady trickle of post-mortems for production issues which couldn't be explained-away as a lack of testing; which secure coding practices would not have prevented; which took multiple experienced developers a while to figure out, and whose behaviour surprised all of them; and which were unavoidably baked into the design decisions of the underlying technology. This was also in a team that purposefully focused on building small, task-specific, loosely-coupled systems. > is switching ecosystems and spending years building up your expertise? Meh, it's easy enough to jump between PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc. since their differences are pretty minimal. Indeed, their language roadmaps seem to be "copy each other's homework" (generators, async, etc.; JS even added a `class` keyword FFS!). Even for someone who's only experienced with one particular approach taken by some specific framework, there's probably a work-alike clone to be found in all of those languages. Heck, the current PHP advocates keep going on about how different PHP7/8 are from PHP4; in which case, it may be easier to jump ship to another interpreted, untyped, imperative, procedural/OO scripting language (which may also be more battle-hardened and stable than that new version of PHP!) It's certainly not like switching from, say, Mercury to Zig! Anecdatally: My first job was PHP programming, which I landed despite having never used it before; I was hired since I knew Python, I did fine. I got another PHP job a year later, whose interview included a written test. A few years later I learned that (a) its purpose was to check if candidates were lying about knowing PHP, by asking questions that exposed PHP's unique quirks and pitfalls; and (b) I'd apparently scored higher than anyone they'd interviewed before or since, despite only having used it for a year. In other words: some programming languages are so similar that switching between them may be easier than learning a new framework. > What happens when you hit another bug in the new ecosystem? My whole point is that this question is not answerable, precisely because "bug" is such a broad category. If the bug is a minor annoyance, we'd work around or avoid it; if it was more serious, but small, we'd maybe upstream a patch; if it was more difficult we'd maybe sponsor a core maintainer to work on it; etc. Presumably we wouldn't be hitting fundamental design problems, since our switching process would not land upon a notoriously flawed technology, cobbled-together by someone who "hates programming" and is "really, really bad at writing parsers"[1] (yet nevertheless proceeds to bake much of their language's semantics into the parser![2]) [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf [2] For example, all the syntax errors and ambiguities I listed at https://stackoverflow.com/a/24463174/884682 https://stackoverflow.com/a/24463174/884682