Quote of the day

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 7:54 PM, Paul Rudin <paul.nospam at rudin.co.uk> wrote:
>> Also:
>>
>>    With a third party solution I don't need to fix the bugs.
>>
>>    But with an in-house solution I at least *can* fix the bugs.
>>
>> The feeling of powerlessness can be crushing when you depend on a
>> third-party component that is broken with no fix in sight.
>>
>>
>
> Presumably it depends on whether you have the source for the third party
> component...

Yes and no. A student of mine asked me how hard it would be to use in
Python a service that provided Java, .NET, and a couple of other SDKs,
but not Python. Source is available for them, sure, but they're so
massive and complicated that it's utterly impractical. (I had been
hoping the SDKs were basically just offering a friendly API to an
underlying HTTP-based service, but no.) So the options were (1) use
Jython so the Java SDK became usable, or (2) fire off a subprocess
that does the work and pipes it back to your app, or (3) spend about
fifty years porting a gigantic lot of code to a new language. And if
there'd been bugs in any of the code, well, options 1 and 2 mean my
student (who knows Python but none of the SDK languages on offer)
would be completely unable to fix it, source or no source - and with
option 3, it'd make the port virtually impossible.

Having the source available is great. It tells you which projects you
DON'T want to touch.

ChrisA
fully aware that some of his projects will be in other people's "DON'T
want to touch" boxes