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Discussion on: What Makes Good Developer Tools... Good?

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Mike Samuel

A good tool takes up more of my burden than it adds. A good tool does the same for the maintainer who comes after me.

If I know that I don't have to worry about a particular kind of failure, then I no longer bear the burden for avoiding that failure mode.

When an authz module checks that the request is authorized to access the requested resource, I bear no burden for access control.

When an autoescaping template encodes untrusted values for me, then I don't bear the burden for avoiding XSS.

When a library clearly outlines all the exceptions that can happen, my burden for error handling is easily understood.

When a client-side web framework uses eval on data attributes in the DOM, now I have to worry about new XSS vectors, so my burden is increased.