Rik Fischer Smoody <riks at smOO.com> wrote:
> Reuse requires a state of mind AND a lot of work.
> It does not happen automatically.
> On that, we agree.

[...]
> Now all of the rest of us see two substantially incomparable things...
> noise, bulk.
> It's REALLY hard to remove those forks.

Please don't speak for "all of the rest of us".



You seem to be arguing that reuse is a good thing.  I completely agree.

I'm saying you don't always have the luxury of trying to reuse every bit of existing code you can find.  To give a concrete example, I once spent 2-3 days looking for a POP implementation, and when I found one, spent another 1-2 days trying to figure out how to fold it into my application with the least amount of change.  In the end, I gave up and wrote my own from scratch--in about 15 minutes.  Granted, it was helpful to look at the other person's code, but straight reuse just didn't work in the short term--the other code simply made a lot of assumptions that were awkward in my particular system.  Furthermore, that was for *POP*, which is relatively simple as far as computer modules go!


Just because I needed a "POP component", and someone had written a "POP component", didn't at all mean I could just pick theirs up and use it.  (And likewise, just because I write "a linux sound module" and someone else writes "a linux sound module", they aren't necessarily duplicates!  There've been at least four such modules to go across this list, all with important differences).


Lex