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I see the benefit of a library as being that I don't need to write the code, but it still won't go in one of my projects until I understand what it does and whe
by carbon8 16y ago
I see the benefit of a library as being that I don't need to write the code, but it still won't go in one of my projects until I understand what it does and whether it actually works the way it should. Personally, I encounter bugs and bad code in libraries all the time, especially in libraries that extend or hook into web frameworks.
- jnunemaker 16y agoExactly!
- _delirium 16y agoI could see that working in web frameworks, where the library code is often doing something vaguely similar to the application code. I'm not sure how well it translates out of that scene, though. Am I really supposed to be reading the GNU libc source in order to debug my problem? Or the LAPACK source? It can occasionally help, but much of the time it won't. Do you really understand how all those libraries operate? Should you have to? I mean, even with web frameworks you could take this to the next level. Want to know how a bit of CSS works? Don't read the HTML5 docs--- just dig right into the Firefox and Chromium codebases to see what browsers actually do with it.
- nkassis 16y agoThat's exactly how I see, the day I have to learn Fortran to read lapack's code base in order to use it is the day I quit programming ;p
- grogers 16y agoIronically, LAPACK is for the most part pretty straight forward. Most of the code is simply shells out to BLAS routines. Because everything is matrix-matrix, it all maps reasonably well to how you'd explain it in a math textbook.