[thechao]

Todd Veldhuizen — of C++ template metaprogramming (in)fame(y) — had a paper called "Parsimony Principles in Software Programming" or something like that. His argument was that libraries should be built in decomposable layers. The bottom layer should be all of the basic utilities that can be cobbled together to build the thing you want. On top of that should be convenience layers that follow "standard happy paths". The unbreakable rule of the upper layers was that they could only be written to the public API of the lower layers, and they should try to expose their internals (given appropriate invariants) as much as possible. Such libraries then come "knob free" for people who just need to "knock stuff together"; but, if you had to dig down, there was a discipline and a public API you could use for the parts that the higher levels were built from.

I mean — maybe in some glorious alternate timeline, but not ours, I guess?