By the time I've written a string library, a date library, a cgi library, sqlite bindings, a templating library, and a graphics library, I could have written my

By the time I've written a string library, a date library, a cgi library, sqlite bindings, a templating library, and a graphics library, I could have written my application in Blub. A lot of these sorts of libraries contain an essential amount of cruft, either because they deal with crufty human things, or because they implement crufty standards.