> From: "Brandon" <blanu at uts.cc.utexas.edu>
> > Um...so are you disagreeing with the concept of using a library? That's
a
> > very odd position to have as a programmer.

2nd response:

Normally yes.
I love libraries, but only when they install and work as documented without
weeks of stuffing around.

The purpose of a library is that code be written once and used n times,
where hopefully n > 1.
The saving in programmer labour makes obvious sense.

For instance, all the Windows msvc libraries are black boxes that have been
mercilessly debugged, and thoroughly documented. They are 'black boxes' that
make life easy. On the rarest occasions, I step my debugger into the MS libs
to see why certain things I've done are fouling up, but this is only a
timesaver. Never, never have I ever needed to recompile a MS lib.

Ditto for, say, Linux standard libs like the basic Posix stuff.

The problem is when Linux programmers enjoy the benefits of programming
facilities that have long been in place within Linux, but are a 'work in
progress' under Windows.

In other words, many 3rd party libs on windows are anything *but* black
boxes - often, these are inadequately documented, and/or unavailable in
binary form, and/or fail to build properly, and/or use other libs that
aren't ready for production, and/or have not been kept up to date with
external dependencies etc etc.

In such cases, the programming time needed to learn the lib, to get it
building, get it working etc, can often exceed the programming time needed
to meet one's own needs without such library. In such cases, it doesn't make
sense to use the 3rd party lib.

David

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Brandon" <blanu at uts.cc.utexas.edu>
> To: <devl at freenetproject.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2001 14:47
> Subject: Re: [freenet-devl] Help - need boilerplate for keyindex record
>
>
> >
> > > > So anyone coding in Java should use the library. Anyone
> > > > not coding in Java should probably use an RDF library for their
> language.
> > >
> > > Fuck that for a joke.
> > > I've had enough of chasing source code, finding it needs n modules
from
> n
> > > other websites, then discovering that several of these n modules each
> need
> > > another m modules from other sites, trying to compile the jumbled
mess,
> > > finding it won't compile and work properly because it was a shoddy
port
> from
> > > Linux, or the msvc project files are out of date, or versions
mis-match,
> and
> > > finding myself up to my eyeballs in a shit job porting/debugging
> zillions of
> > > lines of other people's code, and bloating the shit out of my app and
> > > creating maintenance nightmares along the way.
> >
> > Um...so are you disagreeing with the concept of using a library? That's
a
> > very odd position to have as a programmer.
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Devl mailing list
> > Devl at freenetproject.org
> > http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl
>


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