> a more experienced developer knows when to make the trade-off and solve the problem in-house with a much smaller body of code that's far easier to maintain
Indeed, but this is hopefully obvious to all of us. My point is that the cost of maintenance is vastly higher than is ever really understood. Most code is written in the context of delivering a project, and here the highest cost is considered to be getting functional code out of the door (even the first set of bugs is often overlooked).
I'd propose the counterintuitive and unpopular view that the cost of development is the tiniest fraction of the lifecycle cost of lines of code when you factor in things like bugs, keeping up with security, adapting to environment changes, modifications due to new requirements, and probably most importantly the multiplying effect of adding new moving parts which makes each piece of code in a solution more expensive to write and maintain than the last.
I'm perfectly aware that this will seem ridiculous and in some ways it is a little aggressive to make the point, but as evidence I would consider how many work years are spent on libraries which contain a tiny part of the functionality that is contained in useful software.
Therefore the trade-off, while being about the right things, is very rarely correctly sized.
Indeed, but this is hopefully obvious to all of us. My point is that the cost of maintenance is vastly higher than is ever really understood. Most code is written in the context of delivering a project, and here the highest cost is considered to be getting functional code out of the door (even the first set of bugs is often overlooked).
I'd propose the counterintuitive and unpopular view that the cost of development is the tiniest fraction of the lifecycle cost of lines of code when you factor in things like bugs, keeping up with security, adapting to environment changes, modifications due to new requirements, and probably most importantly the multiplying effect of adding new moving parts which makes each piece of code in a solution more expensive to write and maintain than the last.
I'm perfectly aware that this will seem ridiculous and in some ways it is a little aggressive to make the point, but as evidence I would consider how many work years are spent on libraries which contain a tiny part of the functionality that is contained in useful software.
Therefore the trade-off, while being about the right things, is very rarely correctly sized.