Don’t Reinvent The Wheel: Use What Works

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” When Jeff Goldblum’s rock star mathematician - sorry, chaotician - spoke those immortal lines in Jurassic Park, none of us had any idea how the craft of software development was going to unfold over the next few decades. It was 1994. The world wide web was a handful of academic websites scattered across university servers, Jeff Bezos was on Usenet looking for C++ developers who knew HTML, corporate software was COBOL terminals or Visual Basic on Windows 3.1. There was plenty of free software around, if you knew what to do with a tarball and a makefile, and a few intrepid early adopters were running GNU operating systems built around Linus Torvalds’ Linux kernel, but the term “open source” didn’t exist yet. There was no Java, no .NET, no Python, no JavaScript, no cloud, no AI. Three decades later, it turns out Dr Malcolm wasn’t just talking about cloning dinosaurs – not…