The importance of using Library Functions

[Jimmy Retzlaff]

Doug Tolton (dtolton at yahoo.com) wrote:

[a painful sounding story about writing the equivalent of textwrap.py
under the pressure of a deadline only to discover someone else had
already done it. He offered one remedy:]

>As much as I hate to be the example, it really is a wonderful
>illustratration of why following the Unix / OSS development model is a
>better way to go.
>
>1. Check to see if someone has already written an app to do what you
>want done.
>2. Check to see if someone has written something that is close to what
>you want done.  If you can get the source code, modify it to do what
>you need specifically.
>3. Write it from scratch.

Something that serves me well is to occasionally (maybe once or twice a
year) take 30 minutes or so to browse the entire library documentation
just to rebuild the index in my head.

I also thoroughly read AMK's "What's New" document (e.g.,
http://www.python.org/doc/2.3/whatsnew/) whenever a new version of
Python is released. Keeping up with the next version can also point out
interesting things in development that are often easy to back-port for
use before the next version is released
(http://www.python.org/dev/doc/devel/whatsnew/ - it's a little sparse
right now seeing as 2.3 was just released).

Jimmy