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I'm gonna start by assuming I'm not the only one who has to deal with this (because that's the case in almost any "Am I the only one that x?"), so here it goes...

How do you deal with the urge to use a framework / library for everything?

I started to notice this behavior in myself a few months back, "there's definitely someone who has already made this, so why should I reinvent the wheel?", and my biggest fear is to become someone who just links chunks of code 'till it works. Did you had to deal with this at some point? What was your approach to this "problem"?

Comments
  • 3
    I do this, so do many smart developers I know. Why would I try to reinvent the wheel? I need some code to capture and upload video-do I pull in a tested, maintained and up to date library or spend a week trying to write it myself? You can (and should) read through the source code of the lib too. Stand on the shoulders of giants!
  • 2
    itertools-more for python
    lodash for js

    So here I am promoting darling libs when OP asks for advice on how to *stop* using libs.

    But seriously, anything beyond rich, functional, composable routines for the base language data structures is just adding cruft imho.

    The vast majority of the rest of libs worth a look are highly specialized computation / IO abstractions.

    The rest are just code organizers.
  • 1
    Well, I don't get paid to write beautiful libraries. I get paid to build a solution for a business problem. If I can retrofit a library or framework to get the job done, that's what I do.

    That doesn't mean that I don't write libraries. There are issues with every framework or library. You can write extension libraries to fix those. But that you can do only if you understand how the framework or library works behind all those abstraction layers.

    Or if that shit doesn't exist, then I write it. Because that still is part of solving the business problem. But in hard mode ;)
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