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Comment by mellavora | Hacker News Reader

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mellavora·

> That would be a TON of code added to our applications

wait, doesn't using a library also add that code to your application?

And if the library has to cover more than your immediate needs, isn't is much much more code added?

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I think they mean that it's code they're not having to write/test/maintain themselves because presumably if you pick a good enough library the quality of code/features are better then what one individual or team could do

While there are issues with this approach like the article outlines, personally I believe it to be better then the alternative of countless developers reimplementing the same feature sets over and over because honestly that just seems like a waste of human time and talent

You never actually need 90% of the functionality a library gives, though... With some notable exceptions (cryptography). Most times I've excised a library I've only needed to implement a small part of what it did.

That's true, and there may be valid reasons to remove a library and reimplement that 10% yourself such as for performance, stability or educational reasons. However if the library is performing as expected, does not using 90% of it make it any less valuable? If the problem has been solved in a satisfactory way and remaking it doesn't bring benefit or solve a problem then it seems wasteful to spend the human time to do so

Python: from module1 import function1

To further drive the point, almost everyone seems to be conveniently missing a great benefit of libraries: they tend to be greatly battle-tested, most of the successful ones.

The moment people start realising their own (and most likely crappy) implementation to solve problem Z and discover they didn't consider X or Y or W scenario and haven't even tested for those, most of them will hopefully understand what "balance" and "trade-off" actually mean.

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