Even wrt libraries though, sometimes one can factor out a common code pattern as a library in a particular language, but another language isn’t expressive enough to do that, and is left with a “Design Pattern” instead.

I never understood why there are some people who are fixated on the number of keystrokes. It’s by far the least interesting aspect of any programming language. As long as the typing speed isn’t the bottleneck it won’t matter.

I mean… I never looked back and thought: “Oh I could have saved about 1% of the time if I only had to write 20% of the code.” Seriously… why would I do that?

But I did get annoyed by bad documentation, the lack of code conventions, bad tool chains, run-time errors which should have been caught sooner, etc. All those small annoyances which waste my precious thinking time.

Depending on the language, adding just one little bit more of functionality to the five-line segment might mean having to write the fifty lines.

I remember seeing this in FoxBASE. A fellow developer wanted the functionality of the menu-handling commands but with a timeout. Adding the timeout would have required having to write a menu handler.

Depending on what you expect to need, it might make more sense to write the fifty lines in the first place.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko