I completely agree, but the extremism in the essay is ridiculous. If I'm writing some software, I don't want to have to roll my own version of every little thing when there are battle tested libraries out there that already do it and benefit from many people using it. If my use case is vastly different, sure, but if it's the same use case as everyone else then I see little benefit.
if they are so battle-tested then they probably are not like the email gem that the author spoke of that was using 10mb more memory than necessary for dependencies...
node-land is also getting a bit silly this way... to say nothing of java etc...
since we are into silly quotes i'll riff and probably get this wrong but:
"you wanted a banana but you got the gorilla holding it and the whole jungle too"
joe armstrong (erlang) on Class-based OO inheritance etc...
That is 10 megabytes per ruby application per server. I don't know how many ruby instances there are in the world, but the total memory reduction across the world could easily be in the order of petabytes. Small change with large impact.
no disagreement - better to use someone elses - but if your using one tiny part of a gigantic library of functions, it may be more cost effective to find a better (smaller) library, or write your own.
