Skip to main content

How To Avoid the Fear of Overkill

Something I read today in a Javascript forum gave me pause to think about broader attitudes in developer tools and libraries.
I love jQuery, but if this is all you want to do, jQuery is overkill. 

Javascript libraries are great if you want to do a lot of things, or one really complicated thing, but if you're just doing something small and simple, just write the javascript code. arandomgeek
I respectfully disagree.

Of course, people say this about a lot of other libraries and I defend against this stance in, more or less, all of these cases. I have heard it about Python and things in the standard library, about jQuery, about Django and Twisted, and about any language that isn't C. The common thread here is someone feeling that, as they are not using every or many parts of a tool, they should not use it for the one or two things it could be useful for. These people suffer from the Fear of Overkill.

I can summarize the argument against this very simply.

It would be overkill for you to write the entire tool for the one or two uses you have. It would also be overkill for you to write a bad version of the one or two uses, when you could use what already exists. It is not overkill to simply use what has already been provided to you.

Comments

Two cases to your argument -

1) Using the libraries saves time and improves quality. As a general approach, if I felt the need, I would rather strip down an existing library than build up a new one. The pieces I do keep have been field tested.

2) From a JQuery perspective, I am better off using its library. It, like most of the libraries, have been tuned for cross browser comparability. Those few functions that aren't, are well documented. I would not what to face the task of testing and validating 6-7 browsers for XHR calls I wrote. Or the use cases for the return states.
Rafe Kettler said…
Especially when you're dealing with something open source, where you could remove unnecessary pieces (with the right license) if space were a concern. And especially when languages like Python (dunno about JS) allow you to selectively import (e.g. from x import y). DIY attitudes make no sense to me.
Brandon Rhodes said…
And another argument in favor of jQuery in your case: consistency. By choosing the “big enough” library for a large chunk of your needs, your web site JavaScript code, from the smallest site up to your larger sites, all “looks the same” and can follow whatever set of idioms you use when writing jQuery code. If you forced yourself to step down into raw JavaScript for the smallest projects, then you would have an additional dialect of your own code to deal with.

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful