2010-04-07 » When You Get Stuck, Keep Digging

I just read a great article expressing frustrations that I think a lot of developers have had but haven’t been able to express as well. One of the choice quotes:

“Libraries are a win. But they are not as big a win as they want you to think, and sometimes they are the kind of win that make you wish you’d lost.”

The 2 “prongs” of his manifesto are both really good things for developers to keep in mind. I’ve complained about these same issues many times. I’m sure other people have also had exactly the same issues in relation to my code. Hopefully improvements can be made all around.

If you’ve worked as a developer very long at all, I’m sure you’ll immediately think of a few other projects which have exactly the same sort of useless documentation he describes in “Prong 1”. I’m glad I’m not the only one fed up with useless automatic documentation ala rdoc, javadoc, phpdoc, etc. It’s often a lot easier to just look at the source and/or try a library out than it is to parse through a lot of the “documentation” some projects make available.

I’ve also seen first hand that it’s quite common to spend most of your time yak shaving while you’re trying to fit a solution to a problem it wasn’t quite designed for. It’s true that it’s better use of your time to fit someone else’s library that almost does what you want to your problem, but it’s definitely not as much fun as building something new. I guess that’s why there are so many different Ruby VMs.