I read this post by Lea Verou about why we want to write our own: In defense of reinventing wheels
When I read this I thought immediately of the multitudes of jQuery threads that aren’t actually about jQuery, but generally the use of libraries (and on top of that, “preprocessors”, grids, and stuff that completely changes syntax like CoffeeScript).
Her point about performance and maintainability make sense: if you’re loading Library X for one little feature, and not using all the other stuff LibX was written for, you’re wasting and slowing and complicating. It also means instead of getting your minor task done today it might be another day or two.
She doesn’t mention the other reason that usually crops up in the discussions here: what should newbies do? While the general idea seems to be “newbies should learn vanilla [language] before using [library/syntax-fixer/etc]”, people have put forth arguments that it’s through these modifiers that they learn the vanilla language. People claim they learn CSS while getting stuff done today with a grid. That they learn Javascript by using jQuery (or by peeking at jQuery’s code).
Just curious, where is the line?
- for you personally as a developer
- for where you work/team/company
- for random other people you’ll never meet but whose code you might have to touch
Also any valid points regarding Lea’s article in general will also be interesting, I think.
*edit: I couldn’t remember how I came across the article, but going through my subscribed threads… it was originally brought up by Kohoutek and I’m glad she did!