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a15971 | 3 years ago

It's not that '... developers ... are lazy, and prefer to write as few lines of code as possible, sticking rigidly to the principle of "not reinventing the wheel"'.

They don't do that because they are lazy. They do that because of competitive pressure. In SW development, in most cases, particularly in enterprise development, "the fastest person wins". Whoever moves fast and delivers fast will get to do more projects and have more influence over direction of projects. "Not reinventing the wheel" is of course in vast majority of cases faster than reinventing it.

Because in most cases it's not important to write the best possible code, it's to write "good enough" code, on time and on budget. Insecure code is of course not "good enough", so competitive pressures will adjust accordingly.

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dgb23|3 years ago

That’s assuming you move faster with a given dependency and that there isn’t some non obvious mismatch between it and what you try to accomplish.

bayesian_horse|3 years ago

Reinventing the wheel is also decidedly unfulfilling.

thephyber|3 years ago

“Fulfillment” in a developer’s programming tasks is not a valuable work product. Choosing whether to reinvent the wheel or not is ultimately a business decision that too many developers internalize.

If your product team and management team are blindsided by tech debt or liabilities that you add to the code base because you decided to quietly roll your own crypto (or any other OWASP vulnerability), you are substituting your short term enjoyment for the livelihoods of your coworkers.