alt Hacker NewsI agree. If we look to music, how can a musician unhear what they've heard? We celebrate musicians when they cite their influences. In the case of a software library, it is a tool, not a work of art. Its beauty is in accomplishing a specific, useful task. If we can accept musicians drawing inspiration from all the music they've ever listened to, we should be able to do the same for software, especially when its internal code is unrecognizable from a similar tool.
>I agree. If we look to music, how can a musician unhear what they've heard?
Unlike with music, in software traditionally a (human) programmer could be chosen who haven't "heard" (i.e. read the original code). That has traditionally called a "clean room" implementation (not to be confused with the software development process called "clean room").