Related Illnesses

---

Premature Optimization is an all too common reason behind NIH Syndrome. The fear of obtaining poor performance from third-party code leads many programmers to seek a safe haven in writing their own code. This is not only a fallacy, but also one of the causes of the CAP Epidemic. Duplicate code proliferates the industry, much of it available to the programmers who are duplicating it on their own. The solution to this is to put the concerns about optimization in their correct place at the end of development, and start considering the use of third-party libraries at the beginning of development to avoid duplicating work already done.

NIH Syndrome is one of the many problems born of the myopic planning common to software developers, which is in its own right the minor illness of Myopia. This is not only because writing all your own code ends up being a time-consuming process, but also because features available in external libraries are often perceived as unnecessary until it is too late to adopt them to the project. Do not ignore the certainty of additional features and changing requirements when planning. Otherwise, the project might be built on poor code written by overworked programmers that will eventually collapse like Brittle Bones.

---