
Reusability and NIH - ColinWright
http://irreal.org/blog/?p=982
======
ColinWright
This is an alternative viewpoint to that in the article here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360345>

In that article it is suggested that it's better not to call out to the
operating system to perform tasks that can be re-implemented in your own
program, thereby reducing dependencies and preventing context-switches in
future readers.

But sometimes using well-known, well-tested, long-standing existing code
really is better than re-implementing basic operations in your own code. Yes,
if it's just "rm" then perhaps write it yourself. But when it's more
substantial, and someone else has already done it, and it's there ready to be
used ...

Use it.

~~~
EvilTerran
My go-to example these days is the `find` utility. Sure, you could try to
recurse through directories yourself -- but links (both sym- and hard) make it
surprisingly non-trivial to get right.

