| Now think about how (some) of these libraries came to be: Someone like you wrote something like the above for their needs. Then they needed it again in another program. Then in another. They figured, why not put this into a library I can use across all my projects. Maybe this was internal only. Maybe at some point they thought: why not push this out there to github and upload it to a public repo and let other people use it. Then someone (maybe the same person) needs not just XX.XX.XX.XXXX with actual numbers. For whatever reason their standard is vXX.XX.XX.XXXX[-RCX] or other variations that aren't just a simple number format. Of course if you never ever have a need for that kind of version number (or whatever other "problem area" we apply this principle to) and only ever write one piece of software, you're fine with roll your own. But this is (one way) how libraries get "bloated". The fact that they are libraries (or frameworks if we think a little wider) need to take care of "all the problems" and not just a very specific one. Especially if it's open source and not an in-house only library which attracts lots of people with lots of different variations on the same problem. It's very hard to have a very opinionated stance of "this is what you get, change your version number standards, I'm not changing my library". Of course you can do that, but your library will probably end up in obscurity. The "can deal with anything you throw at us" is probably going to be more popular and if there's no Linus type guy doing code reviews before accepting contributions, you end up with sub-optimal code very quickly. I've done the opposite before. I came to a code base that had various variations on sending email notifications for batch jobs. Like literally 20 jobs with 20 variations (well maybe it was 15 different ones with different types of bugs and quirks). I extracted them into an in-house library for sending a standardized version of these emails. In the end it had accumulated quite a few features for adjusting the email template, attaching various formats of output, automatically zipping it up etc. I'm pretty sure you might call it "bloated". In reality it made things better (consistent) for the users receiving those, easier for us to understand errors, faster to code new jobs and just calling one standard function that everyone knew how to use and that all bugs had been ironed out from over time. Import library, call function. Instead of deciding which other project to copy the email sending code from, finding out where in the mess of code it was, throwing it away again because "Oh yeah right, that project's version of it can't deal with this type of attachment etc. |