[prox]

I use to read the blog on virtualdub.org (video capture and processing) and enjoy his rants on bundled library bloat. Virtualdub was small in footprint and great to use. So do programmers become reliant on scaffolding too much, or is it a necessity as you learn?

[andreareina]

Why not both? I mean, I wouldn't say that it's actually necessary, but scaffolding exists to hide away the incidental complexities of the problem being solved, revealing the problem for what it is. Demonstrations of recursion and pattern matching tend to use the same problems because they're such a good fit that there's a very close correspondence between the high-level explanation of how to solve the problem and the code itself.

At the same time we ought to be aware of that scaffolding and how it works (or could work), and how to build such abstractions ourselves. Not just because all abstractions leak[1][2] and potentially introduce bloat, but also because it means I don't have to pull in another dependency to save me a page (or three lines) of trivial code. Or maybe because the "standard" solution doesn't quite support your use case (I can't count the number of times that I've rewritten python's lru_cache[3] because of it not accepting lists and dicts).

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

[2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

[3] https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.l...