As someone who has written a DB handle… that shit is hard, I had to be extremely careful to protect against SQL injection. Everyone rolling their own is how we return to the Era of XSS and SQL Injection on every website. I’d prefer to have young devs use libraries and contribute as they gain knowledge.
They do… but the road to naturally learning that lesson comes with the cost of enabling botnets and destroying businesses. Maybe there should be a qualification exam to be a developer but when there isn’t we need to make sure more junior developers have the best tools they can get to fight against foot guns.
Also, on the topic of security, a lot of good senior level developers don’t have the specialized knowledge to do shit like build a password validation system that isn’t vulnerable to a timing attack or know what a timing attack is…
And timezones, fuck timezones, I’ve written code that correctly handled timezones (and subsequently threw it away when Canada decided to DST on a different weekend). Imagine how shitty it’d be if we constantly had to reinvent the wheel when it came to timezones.
Oh, and forget about databases… do you know how fucking hard it is to write an ACID compliant WAL? The reason postgres is the default open source database (and why so many databases are just layers built on top of postgres’s engine) is because it’s fucking hard. Mongo still (IIRC) has consistency issues, they were a tech darling for half a decade and can’t manage to NoSQL as well as Postgres.
Also, good luck building a GUI with anything more complicated than curses style box art characters.
I started mildly disagreeing with you but I disagree even more that I’ve thought about other tools people would need to roll on their own.
a lot of good senior level developers don’t have the specialized knowledge to do shit like build a password validation system that isn’t vulnerable to a timing attack or know what a timing attack is
Not every time, just the first time. But yes. Devs should stop being so lazy
Every dev should at least know the basics of language design and compiler design, yes. Again, you also only have to learn it once
As someone who has written a DB handle… that shit is hard, I had to be extremely careful to protect against SQL injection. Everyone rolling their own is how we return to the Era of XSS and SQL Injection on every website. I’d prefer to have young devs use libraries and contribute as they gain knowledge.
People need to learn to be careful
They do… but the road to naturally learning that lesson comes with the cost of enabling botnets and destroying businesses. Maybe there should be a qualification exam to be a developer but when there isn’t we need to make sure more junior developers have the best tools they can get to fight against foot guns.
Also, on the topic of security, a lot of good senior level developers don’t have the specialized knowledge to do shit like build a password validation system that isn’t vulnerable to a timing attack or know what a timing attack is…
And timezones, fuck timezones, I’ve written code that correctly handled timezones (and subsequently threw it away when Canada decided to DST on a different weekend). Imagine how shitty it’d be if we constantly had to reinvent the wheel when it came to timezones.
Oh, and forget about databases… do you know how fucking hard it is to write an ACID compliant WAL? The reason postgres is the default open source database (and why so many databases are just layers built on top of postgres’s engine) is because it’s fucking hard. Mongo still (IIRC) has consistency issues, they were a tech darling for half a decade and can’t manage to NoSQL as well as Postgres.
Also, good luck building a GUI with anything more complicated than curses style box art characters.
I started mildly disagreeing with you but I disagree even more that I’ve thought about other tools people would need to roll on their own.
Please don’t tell me that. It’s terrifying
Honestly, why? We’ve got billions of people driving around in cars they don’t know how to build. Is that a problem too?
Yeah. Kinda actually
The best developers are the laziest.
I’d take a dev slowly using a library with a one liner than a noob writing 500 lines of code doing the same thing any day.
That’s how you end up with the unmaintainable state that enterprise software is currently in. “Just Works” mentality is a cancer