There are situations where one uses a full featured abstraction like a database without needing to understand fully or modify it's internals. This is simply not one of them.
This is a situation where building a new applications with handmade layers that produce the outcome you want is more efficient than gluing together existing code.
You're coming at a complex problem by initially filtering the solution space. This discards much of the potential solution space for which the average case may be more expensive than The average case in the space after culling. However in many situations that solution space has many gems which are more efficient. Companies' tolerance to selecting those rather than using existing technology varies.
Knowing how a database is constructed and having to building one for the project are two different things. Yes friend, if a database is a major component of your system you should know how it works under the hood. They’re quite complicated and impose significant constraints on the system you’re building.
with the current state of technology and the speed of it's progress, there will always be much more things that you don't understand than those that you do...
With regard to the details sure, but the fundamentals should be studied and understood. That's why this blog is not attempting to recreate the entire of Microsoft Excel.
That's not really the point. If someone says "look how easy it is to do X," then I want to see them doing X from scratch, so I can get an idea how hard it would be to use the language for my unsolved problems. If it turns out they're just dragging in prewritten code, that's useless to me.
Depends. If they told me "look how easy it is to apply this function to a certain subset of the elements of this array" and they show me map and filter instead of a for loop I would be all for it, even if it's "prewritten" code.
But I get the example about roman numerals, editors and browsers.
The browser drop-in was extremely useful. I made a blazing fast browser had view-source as a first class button was able to add in my favourites as icons. Better yet I could make the browser fullscreen.
I would consider it a browser that used an engine. Now a days everyone but firefox is using WebKit.. not much of a difference.
Curious how you would do that today without vb.net
I guess the point is that you can't really say you've made a browser. It's like bringing store-bought brownies to a party and claiming you made them yourself.
But he made the browser - the browser is the application itself (what he made) - not the browser's engine. Saying that he didn't make a browser is like saying Notepad++'s author didn't really made an editor because he used Scintilla.
A lot of the time, understanding someones solution is harder than just solving it myself.
If it's a complicated problem that can be boiled down to a simple API, I'll reach for it for sure. But I never have good luck with complicated problems wrapped in a complicated API. Usually I only need to solve 5% of the problem, so I'll either find a library that focuses on that 5%, or I'll code it myself.