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in reply to Re: •Re: Re: Re: OT: A reasonable temporary password generator?
in thread A reasonable temporary password generator?

As you've written it, you aren't really saying code re-use is good, you're saying only code-reuse is good.
I don't think so, especially if it lets you draw the following conclusion from that...
This is the same fabulous rhetoric, "Don't reinvent the wheel." There would be no Perl at all if Larry had taken these adages to heart b/c he could have re-used the shells, C, awk, and sed and pretty much covered what the first few versions of Perl did and then some.
The important difference between what Larry did to create Perl and what most people do when they "reimplement" a templating system or a CGI param parser is that Larry carefully studied prior art.

I have no problems with people reinventing things when they've already studied prior art. But 90% of the time, I see that people are merely reinventing things because it "wasn't invented here" or "I think I can do better" or "I didn't know something already existed" or "the author is not accepting my patches". Those reasons are insufficient for me, and I'm doing my best to stop that.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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