use Perl

• I was confused by this, too (Score:2)

  by Ovid (2709)

  He states in the comments that aside from the (allegedly) poorly written HTML Agility Pack [codeplex.com], there was really nothing available for him for .NET. If that's the case, he seems to have made a solid choice. Plus, he's released the code for others to use.
  • But what about the "copious test cases available"? (Score:1)

    by nihiliad (8883)

    I think the comment by Adam Gomaa on Atwood's blog nails it, especially:

    ...I would have gone with a port of another language/platform's sanitizer, because I *guarantee* there are domain problems they've dealt with that you couldn't possibly have have thought up on your first iteration.

    Atwood so far hasn't commented on whether or not he did that, or whether or not he thinks that's a good idea in general. The comments he did make, e.g. "scars of experience", suggest that he would answer "no" to both questi
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    There's great difference between rewriting existing code to learn (or because it's the "core competence" of your project) and writing code that doesn't exist. I've only met one person (Chuck Moore) who does the former rigorously, and I'll take the advice from him that that's the best way to learn something. Jeff Atwood? Not a chance.
• Wow. (Score:1)

  by rjbs (4671)

  I was totally with him until, "I don't need to trust libraries." I might not trust other people's libraries for some problems... but only after *trying* to trust them. I'm not sure I could even say that sentence out loud.

  --
  rjbs
• Writing your own implementations is good sometimes (Score:1)

  by exussum0 (8885)

  In my experience, only novices think "I should write my own CGI parameter handling code!" while the experts think "Too much busy work; I'll work on something that matters."

  I take exception w/ this statement since it's probably not complete. Absolutes not always being right and all. (Hi everyone!)

  For learning, anyone should write anything they can, as low or high level as their capacity allows. Write your own parser, your own number cruncher, your own implementation of IEEE floating point. It breeds
• Design incompetence. (Score:1)

  by flogic (8886)

  Atwoods first mistake was deciding converting Markdown to HTML was a core competency. Their core competency should be community construction. The second mistake is supporting all of Markdown. Since inline HTML is such a huge can of worms, you should say "We don't support that bit."
• Unknown unknowns (Score:2)

  by brian_d_foy (44)

  In one of the Stackoverflow podcast episodes, Jeff and Joel Spolsky discuss this at some length. Joel finished it off with a story about why the Excel team at Microsoft vigorously excised any dependencies to the point that they even had their own compiler. That, however, was back in the day when programmers had to seriously consider memory footprint, loading sequence, paging, and other things the most of us probably don't even know how to deal with anymore.

  I've been going through all of the Stackoverflow po
• Working with Spolsky is rotting his brain (Score:1)

  by shauber (8887)

  I stopped following Spolsky a while back. And quite honestly, the longer Atwood hangs around Spolsky, the closer I come to not paying any attention to him either. Which is a shame, he used to have some good insights.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    No, he never did. Jeff’s personal brand has always been about writing at an accessible level on a consistent schedule. He did not change much at all over time. If you think he has, it’s probably you changing and outgrowing him.