Writing Libraries Is Considered Harmful

All similarities are accidental. All characters are fictional and have no relation to the real world.

I was reading one book on in a way advanced ruby. And since I know that the ruby community can be quite good the standard of expectations was quite high on my part. I imagine in my mind that the book is by somebody who also is a library writer.

So it definetly starts with some good stuff from the logics point of view. I enjoy learning such bits that make things clear.

But then I encountered that most of the text is a counter-revolution against that simplicity.

First I started to notice this pattern: the author creates an imaginary problem like something must be “non-performant”. And then starts to turn ruby into some monstrous thing with different moves. But then finally he finds flaws in the latest ugly solution so it is rejected too.

Those moves definetly bring alot of code examples and thus book volume. And I’m aware that such moves have exploratory education value in theory. But the pattern from “good” things to ugly things for arbitrary reasons is counter-intuitive and counter-ruby I’d say. I have not checked for better ways to present such explorations I only state some annoyance and reasoning behind it.

Then I started to skim through places and what finished me is calling those who actively nag about the shape of ifs used during code review as “philosophers”. Why not to call them “philosopher-kings” right-away then?

Probably editor or some other “reviewer” must have nagged the author into doing all this. Otherwise I would think that writing libraries should be considered harmful.