D For A Web Developer

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 30 April 2014 at 15:04:53 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Wednesday, 30 April 2014 at 07:14:34 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
> wrote:
>> I think one of the great things about Rails and Ruby is all 
>> the libraries and plugins that are available. If I want to do 
>> something, in RoR there's a big chance there's already a 
>> library for that. In D, there's a big chance I need to 
>> implement it myself.
>
> I like implementing things myself :P
>
> That's the question I dread most at meetings now: "is there a 
> gem for this?" idk, in the time it takes to search for and 
> evaluate third party code, I could have just written it myself. 
> Especially since libraries almost always need some kind of 
> customization for our specific case anyway!
>
> There's a few exceptions where something is hard to write, but 
> most things just aren't that hard.

I agree with this, but with a caveat:

The valuable work in a 3rd party lib is more often the design 
than the body of the implementation. Designing a good API and 
general design for a library requires experience and perspective 
that I don't have in most problem spaces, but a quick bit of 
reading and the internals are often trivial to reproduce.


I think this is particularly relevant in D; Implementation is 
made easy, but the flexibility available makes the design stage 
especially important. That is not to say that it's harder to make 
good designs with D, more that it's feasible to make *even 
better* designs if you have the expertise and time.