I guess I shouldn't but One thing that surprises me is the lack of developer friendly libraries like this coming out of major corporations that should know better.
Why, for example, is Stripe leading the charge on decent credit card front ends when Visa could spend a few million and produce the one and only Unicode, works everywhere, looks up addresses credit card entry form.
Why is an advertising company doing this when any of the major telcos have this internal knowledge lying around?
I think the concept of giving something away that someone did on the clock seems utterly stupid to them (on the surface it does sound dumb). Even though a solid library that's really useful can take on a life of its own and require less work in the future - just getting a port to a different language for free could make it well worth while if you ever needed it. Then there's licensing and lawyering around releasing something. I understand it, but also wish this would happen more often.
Part of the problem is, designing a friendly library requires taking into account all of the use cases of other people.
Often when you're developing an app, even one completely in open source, you aren't designing all parts of it for maximum reusability. There are tons of private APIs in most apps, including most open source apps.
It's usually after the application which drove the development of the utility code in the first place is finished and stabilized, that people go back and figure out how to refactor it to make it generally more useful.
Why, for example, is Stripe leading the charge on decent credit card front ends when Visa could spend a few million and produce the one and only Unicode, works everywhere, looks up addresses credit card entry form.
Why is an advertising company doing this when any of the major telcos have this internal knowledge lying around?
The blindness does seem almost wilful at times.