Question for the conscience
Who is the better developer?
Who is the better developer?
a) The developer that can do anything by head, will be able to work with any given API and build an application around it
b) The developer who will always be able to find libraries to do what he wants, and "glues" them together into an application
c) both
d) neither
June 8, 2007 - tags: technology
Ivo Jansch: e) the one that uses PHP
June 8, 2007
Horst Gutmann: I’d say something in between (a) and (b) since there are some APIs out there, that are just too simple to a library for. For instance Flickr

But for more complicated stuff it’s always nice to have a library if you need to…
June 8, 2007
Mike Nolan: The key is in understanding. If a developer copy and pastes code without any understanding of what that are doing then there will be trouble, but if you are using a library because it is the best way (or has the best ROI) then that is perfectly valid. If you suggest we should never use libraries, then why not say that we should never using a high level programming language and we should write in assembler
June 8, 2007
stefan: Ivo: very easy answer, but of course I agree
Horst: I must admit that even for using the Flickr API, I have found a nice library
Mike: Spot on. Understanding is the key I guess. My suggestions was far from never to use libraries. Actually it was quite the opposite. I was wondering why so many people insist on writing everything from scratch.
June 11, 2007
leon: I agree with Mike. We dont need the write every application from scratch but on the other hand a programmer needs some basic understanding about how the language or library is working.
This comes in handy when debugging (a library can also contains bugs) and extending it.
A few years ago I’ve wrote my own PHP extensions and doing that I’ve learned a lot about how PHP is working and it helps me now.
Stefan, remember the == and === problem?
June 16, 2007