Re:There's still no silver bullet
by kaba0 on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @06:04AM
(#36504423)
An often under-appreciated part of the original paper is effectively libraries - code you don’t have to write yourself.
This is absolutely the biggest contribution to productivity improvements over that time period, and I think that we don’t always make good use of them (NIH syndrome, it’s not written in my favorite language, etc). Seriously, if there is a good quality library for the task already, just use it! That’s why python is where it is today in the data science community, and is also the reason why I will start any new project on the JVM unless there is a good reason not to. (The third contender for the biggest ecosystem is JS, and while it has similarly vast amount of packages, I found their average quality is behind that of the JVM’s)
This is absolutely the biggest contribution to productivity improvements over that time period, and I think that we don’t always make good use of them (NIH syndrome, it’s not written in my favorite language, etc). Seriously, if there is a good quality library for the task already, just use it! That’s why python is where it is today in the data science community, and is also the reason why I will start any new project on the JVM unless there is a good reason not to. (The third contender for the biggest ecosystem is JS, and while it has similarly vast amount of packages, I found their average quality is behind that of the JVM’s)