> A large complicated well maintained and widely used library is infinitely preferable to a large complicated library you need to maintain yourself and used only by you.
Yes, but a large complicated well maintained and widely used library is not necessarily preferable to a small not so complicated library that does exactly what you need and nothing else. And that goes for formats too.
Recently I was involved in a project where order numbers had to be sent from one system to another. Some colleagues insisted that we baked them into a large xml document and then used libraries to both create the documents as well as parse them. In this case the economic thing to do was to write them each separated by EOL. Even the code we would have written ourselves would have been larger if we’d used the XML solution, not to talk about everything needed to include in builds and deploys.
Yes, but a large complicated well maintained and widely used library is not necessarily preferable to a small not so complicated library that does exactly what you need and nothing else. And that goes for formats too.
Recently I was involved in a project where order numbers had to be sent from one system to another. Some colleagues insisted that we baked them into a large xml document and then used libraries to both create the documents as well as parse them. In this case the economic thing to do was to write them each separated by EOL. Even the code we would have written ourselves would have been larger if we’d used the XML solution, not to talk about everything needed to include in builds and deploys.