alt Hacker NewsAnd you can write them when you need them.
The situation where you need a red black tree with 10 different key/value combos isn’t real.
Replies
gpderetta • today at 12:30 PM
If you can only write programs by banging rocks together, you will only produce programs that can be written by banging rocks together.
dwattttt • today at 3:31 AM
You could take away anything you use and say "but we could make it ourselves", that doesn't mean it's helpful.
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If, by "situation", you mean the development of a small program with so many constraints that using existing libraries is out if the question, then yes.
Otherwise, that seems unwise to me. Not every user of a generic type has to be generic. A major selling point of generic types is that you write a library once, then everyone can instantiate it. Even if that is the only instance they need in their use case, you have saved them the trouble of reinventing the wheel.
No colleague of mine may need 10 different instances of any of my generic libraries, but I bet that all of them combined do, and that our bosses are happy that we don't have to debug and maintain 10+ different implementations.