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Comment by gglitch | Hacker News Reader

Charming quote. The same argument could be made about making your own food "from scratch." But it's not a solid refutation of the essay. Let's say that if one end of the spectrum is unlimited dependencies and complete indifference to the complexity and size of the project, and the other end of the spectrum is raising your own goats, there must be an ideal somewhere in the middle.

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I completely agree, but the extremism in the essay is ridiculous. If I'm writing some software, I don't want to have to roll my own version of every little thing when there are battle tested libraries out there that already do it and benefit from many people using it. If my use case is vastly different, sure, but if it's the same use case as everyone else then I see little benefit.

Have you read a modest proposal by J Swift. Satire at its best! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

if they are so battle-tested then they probably are not like the email gem that the author spoke of that was using 10mb more memory than necessary for dependencies...

node-land is also getting a bit silly this way... to say nothing of java etc...

since we are into silly quotes i'll riff and probably get this wrong but: "you wanted a banana but you got the gorilla holding it and the whole jungle too" joe armstrong (erlang) on Class-based OO inheritance etc...

10 megabytes of memory more than necessary! Because that's a massive waste of memory in 2016.

Allocation of that memory still costs /something/ even if ram is so plentiful as to be free.

Making your own library also costs something, which are probably more scarce than RAM.

no disagreement - better to use someone elses - but if your using one tiny part of a gigantic library of functions, it may be more cost effective to find a better (smaller) library, or write your own.

The kind of thinking that got us web browsers using multi GB of RAM...

That is 10 megabytes per ruby application per server. I don't know how many ruby instances there are in the world, but the total memory reduction across the world could easily be in the order of petabytes. Small change with large impact.

As a middle-ground, one could leverage existing source and send patches to fix the inefficiencies.

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