“I Could Rewrite Curl”
What&#x27;s frustrating is people who think that they can radically simplify something without knowing anything about it. The same people think they can implement a text editor in 1000 lines of code because that&#x27;s how the first text editors were made. Why can&#x27;t we go back to those simple days?<p>We can&#x27;t because modern software handles cases that those didn&#x27;t. For example, rendering and editing text seems straightforward until you look closer. Text Rendering Hates You (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gankra.github.io&#x2F;blah&#x2F;text-hates-you&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gankra.github.io&#x2F;blah&#x2F;text-hates-you&#x2F;</a>) and Text Editing Hates You Too (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lord.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;text-editing-hates-you-too&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lord.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;text-editing-hates-you-too&#x2F;</a>) are two amazing reads that analyze this in detail. They explain the hidden complexity to the vast majority of us who never knew. We simply slapped down a &lt;textarea&gt; or &lt;EditText&gt; and called it a day.<p>If we tried to reimplement this stuff from scratch, we would likely start with a simple implementation, then tack on bits when we tried to handle issues like right-to-left layouts, Unicode, emoji, anti-aliasing, text overlapping and so on. All this before getting into implementing features that Dennis Ritchie didn&#x27;t have to, like supporting plugins, releasing on multiple operating systems, accessibility or even syntax highlighting. Problems already known to and tackled by existing text editors today.<p>If you look at work outside of your area of expertise and you feel like starting a sentence like &quot;why don&#x27;t you just ...&quot;, then reconsider. If the person you&#x27;re talking to is halfway competent (they probably are), they&#x27;ve already considered what you&#x27;re about to say. &quot;Have you considered using less memory&#x2F;CPU or removing this feature that I personally don&#x27;t need?&quot; Why yes, we have.<p>(This is from a post I wrote earlier - Software Isn’t Bloated - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.nindalf.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;software-isnt-bloated&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.nindalf.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;software-isnt-bloated&#x2F;</a>)