The reality is there is no way to build everything. You want to do scientific computing do you use libraries that have been optimized for 50 years or do you write your own? You want to do cryptography do you build your own? Pretty much everyone working on LLMs today is leveraging things like nccl, cuda, pyTorch, job scheduling frameworks.

Let's face it. Nobody builds everything from scratch. The closest is companies like Google who due to sheer scale benefit from building everything from hardware to languages and even for them it's not always clear whether that was the right thing for the business or something they could afford to do because they had lots of money.

Build the things that add value. Don't build something that just works. That's why we have the old saying don't reinvent the wheel. If you have a working wheel, while re-inventing it might be fun, it's usually not the best use of time. In the time you've saved build cool things that add value.

Sure. We should harness enthusiasm and channel it in the right direction.

I'm not sure I agree the giants of today are built on the work of enthusiastic novices. Amazon and Microsoft have always had a ton of senior talent. Meta started with novices but then a lot got reworked by more experienced people.

You might get by with sheer enthusiasm and no experience but often that leads you to failure.

I was trying to make a point... Apparently not very well ;)

But let's take on the testing framework question. When I work in Go or in Python I use the testing frameworks that are part of that ecosystem. When I worked with C++ I'd use the Boost testing framework. Or Google's open source testing framework. Engineers I work with that do front-end development use Playwright (and I'm sure some other existing framework for unit tests).

Can't you do your own thing? sure. You'd be solving a lot of problems that other people have already solved. Over time the thing you did on your own will require more work. You need to weigh all of that vs. using something off the shelf. 9 times out of 10, most people, should use tooling that exists and focus on the actual product they want to build.

That said I work for a large company where we build a lot of additional in-house tooling. It makes sense because: a) it's a specialized domain - there's nothing off the shelf that addresses our specific needs. b) we are very large and so building custom tools is an investment that can be justified over the entire engineering team. We still use a ton of stuff off the shelf.

I don't see what the parent was saying. I think most of the time people choose to use existing bits for good reasons. When I started my career you pretty much had to do most stuff yourself. These days you almost always can find a good off the shelf option for most "standard" things you're trying to do. If you want to write your own testing framework for fun, go for it. If you're trying to get something else done (for business or other reasons) it's not something that usually makes sense. That said it's not like we have a shortage of people trying to do new things or revisit old things, for fun or profit. We have more than ever (simply because we have more than ever people doing software in general).

None of my friends who graduated with me are still software developers and I’m several years from retirement age.

There’s a bunch of filters. Many people quickly realize they don’t enjoy development, next is openings in management. One of the big ones is at ~40 you’re debt free, have a sizable nest egg, and start thinking of you really want to do this for the next 20 years?

A part of this is the job just keeps getting easier over time. Good developers like a challenge, but realize that the best code is boring. Tooling is just more robust when you’re doing exactly the same things as everyone else using it, and people can more easily debug and maintain straightforward code. So a project that might seem crazy difficult at 30 starts to just feel like a slog through well worn ground.

Having significant experience in something also becomes a trap as you get rewarded for staying in that bubble until eventually the industry moves on to something else.

The exponential growth has been something like 3-4%/year, or 2x in 20 years. Though it's hard to find useful statistics that take different job titles and changing nature of the industry properly into account.

If you had asked me in 2010, I would have said that the median software developer lasts 5-10 years in the industry. A lot of people left the field after the dot-com bubble burst. The same happened again in a smaller scale in the late 2000s, at least in countries where the financial crisis was a real-world event (and not just something you heard about in the news). But now there has been ~15 years of sustained growth, and the ratio of mid-career developers to juniors may even be higher than usual.

You're quite right in that early C was a primitive compiler, and adding a macro processor was a cheap and easy way to add power.

Using the macro preprocessor to work around some fundamental issues with the language is not what I meant.

I meant devising one's own language using macros. The canonical example:

    #define BEGIN {
    #define END }

The tales I hear about Lisp is that a team's code is not portable to another team, because they each invent their own macro language in order to be able to use Lisp at all.

... for you

Just because there is an absolute shitshow for C/C++ build systems doesn't automatically make Cargo & Crates.io good.

There is a fundamental philosophical disagreement I have with the NPM style of package management and this method of handling dependencies. Like NPM, Crates.io is a chaotic wasteland, destined for a world of security & license problems and transitive dependency bloat.

But honestly I'm sick of having this out on this forum. You're welcome to your opinion. After 25 years of working, with various styles of build and dependency management: I have mine.