I’ve been in this game for 30 and I agree with GP. “I won’t build that simple thing from scratch, I’ll just import this thing that does approximately what I want.”

We should banish the word “import” in favor of “take a dependency on someone else’s code, including the stability of the API, the support model, willingness to take patches, testing philosophy…”

Reputation is a rough proxy; inspecting the code can help. But when the thing you built your house of cards on falls over, you often can’t fix your house, and have to build a new house.

Obviously this applies more to utility code than it does to entire languages. But even there, Apple has broken their Swift syntax enough to release tools that upgrade your code for you…and that’s the best case scenario.