“I Could Rewrite Curl”

And the fact that it would be really easy to rewrite a usable subset of curl if you use your language's `import curl` which has behind the scenes had as much development effort as curl itself.

Pff. I can write cURL _in Python_ in 1 line.

    import pycurl

What'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's how the first text editors were made. Why can't we go back to those simple days?

We can't because modern software handles cases that those didn't. For example, rendering and editing text seems straightforward until you look closer. Text Rendering Hates You (https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/) and Text Editing Hates You Too (https://lord.io/blog/2019/text-editing-hates-you-too/) 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 or and called it a day.

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'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.

If you look at work outside of your area of expertise and you feel like starting a sentence like "why don't you just ...", then reconsider. If the person you're talking to is halfway competent (they probably are), they've already considered what you're about to say. "Have you considered using less memory/CPU or removing this feature that I personally don't need?" Why yes, we have.

(This is from a post I wrote earlier - Software Isn’t Bloated - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/software-isnt-bloated/)

I wouldn't be surprised if the first comment is right that you could build a HTTP client sufficient for 90% of the usecases in ~100 lines or so. It's that other 10% that takes 90% of the time, effort and complexity, and for which having libraries like curl is invaluable.

I really wish busybox would bundle curl instead of wget. In the age of containers, I often find myself having to use wget when operating inside of one with busybox as shell, and I get it wrong on first try.

What usually trips me up is the syntax: `curl -O http://host/file` (goes to stdout without -O) instead of `wget http://host/file` (goes to file without -O)