>In 20 years you've never started work on something and after a bit said damn it I think I'll use that library that other guy developed?
nope, I am just saying what I said, I never regretted not using one, and have regretted investing in a few that later caused more headaches than they were worth.
When we switched from inhouse code to a dependency, we never regretted doing it on our own to start with because there was so much insight gained from this and many other side benefits (like direct control, intuitive understanding of how our code worked, etc...).
But when you have a dependency you add that you later have to work around, you simply can't fix in the same way can your own code, and you just hate the mess in a totally different way.
When it's your own code, you can fix anything. And replace it a piece at a time if need be. With a dependency, there's usually catches, hacks or work arounds, or conflicts built up over years that finally have come to a head. And it sucks to fix and in many cases if I had waited even a little while, or did more research at the time, I would have picked a different dependency or none at all.
There are a lot of dependencies we use, I don't think you can run a business properly these days without them. They just are not a part of our core systems anymore. We use them for tertiary systems and addons, things that a replaceable. Then our core systems can't be hijacked by stuff like the latest NPM debacle.
Yeah, this also matches my (+10 year) experience as a professionnal dev ... with one exception, though: the "maintainance-can-of-worm" packages.
These are packages which, by design, can never be considered as finished, and periodically need to be updated to stay relevant in your application.
There are three reasons for this:
1) Those packages implement an ever-growing pile of tricks/heuristics to convincingly solve problems from the domain. They include: physics engines, SMT solvers, compilers/jitters/optimizers, computational geometry packages, video encoders ...
2) Those packages implement an unification layer over an ever-growing/evolving set of underlying APIs/protocols/formats. They include: SDL, ncurses, curl, ImageMagick ...
(these are not to be confused with "bug-factories" packages, which might not solve a complex problem, but still require constant updating to fix the current bugs, and benefit from the new ones).
nope, I am just saying what I said, I never regretted not using one, and have regretted investing in a few that later caused more headaches than they were worth.
When we switched from inhouse code to a dependency, we never regretted doing it on our own to start with because there was so much insight gained from this and many other side benefits (like direct control, intuitive understanding of how our code worked, etc...).
But when you have a dependency you add that you later have to work around, you simply can't fix in the same way can your own code, and you just hate the mess in a totally different way.
When it's your own code, you can fix anything. And replace it a piece at a time if need be. With a dependency, there's usually catches, hacks or work arounds, or conflicts built up over years that finally have come to a head. And it sucks to fix and in many cases if I had waited even a little while, or did more research at the time, I would have picked a different dependency or none at all.
There are a lot of dependencies we use, I don't think you can run a business properly these days without them. They just are not a part of our core systems anymore. We use them for tertiary systems and addons, things that a replaceable. Then our core systems can't be hijacked by stuff like the latest NPM debacle.