Reinventing The Standard

Lets face it. If you want to write code today, you are going to have to understand and interact with one or more standards. Probably more. Standards can more often than not be viewed as a necessary evil. Well, standards aren't evil, they just seem that way because they are quite good at pointing out human error.

As an example, if you are putting together even a simple networked application, it makes sense to use some kind of application-level data transfer standard such as HTTP. Even if it is a simple application, the development effort isn't likely to move any faster by using non-standardized protocols.

Sometimes it does make sense to reinvent standards. All the developers in the world are never going to agree on what the standard programming language that everyone should use. Not going to happen. There are too many cases where one is better than the other. This is fine because we don't need to standardize programming languages. The protocols and data representations are all that really matter.

This also means that any developer isn't restricted to using a popular library API. If it doesn't fit in well with what they are trying to do, it isn't worth it. The code saved from being written by using the library could cause more harm than good. This shouldn't matter as long as the publicly accessible components of the application use well understood standards.