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Yep, exactly. 80% of a feature may take 20% of the time to develop, but the rest (edge cases) will take the majority of the time, and that's time you could have spent working on core features for your system. That's why it's almost always better to use an existing library: chances are most of the bugs will already have been encountered and squashed.

I find the whole "do it yourself" mentality to be a form of NIH syndrome.




I often found that your remaining 20% is not the same 20% as the library authors, unless the task at hand is very constrained and standardized. Everybody has different edge cases. Finding the bugs relevant to your application in someone elses code is much harder than finding it in your own.


My code turns into "someone elses" code after a mere few years, and my coworkers code is already by definition "someone elses" code, in my experience. Replacing "our" code with a pre-existing library has been a great way to flush out bugs both in our replaced code, and in our calling code, as well.




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