[moron4hire]

So many libraries in the wild aren't "well-tested, heavily used", though, and sometimes it is really hard to differentiate between popular and good.

At the end of the day, the only person who is responsible for the quality of your proje t is you. You have to figure out which parts of your project are key to your operation and which are just window dressing. If your job is to make a blogging platform, I would expect many features of formatting documents to be reimplementations of other people's work, because you have to know you are relying on yourself for your core purpose.

I also don't understand the heartburn other developers have over knowing "OMG L, THERE IS SOMEONE ON TEH INTARWEBS AND THEY ARE REINVENTING THE WHEEL". It smacks of fear, a fear that is ultimately rooted in insecurity. If a person was secure in their knowledge of their skills, their ability to understand problems and fix them, then there should be nothing to fear from a dozen or a million different libraries doing the same thing and running into one or two of them on one's next project. It is just a matter of course.

[pcwalton]

> If a person was secure in their knowledge of their skills, their ability to understand problems and fix them, then there should be nothing to fear from a dozen or a million different libraries doing the same thing and running into one or two of them on one's next project.

I actually do fear a million reimplementations of, say, RSA.

[moron4hire]

The impact of bad software is vastly overrated. Almost all of it is bad already, and yet we haven't killed ourselves off as a species yet.