Great Developers Steal
summary
Argues that useful reuse is concrete: identifies sampling (Girl Talk using snippets), influence (SUnit → JUnit → rspec) and ports (bad: NUnit line‑by‑line Java copy; good: Michael Feathers’ CppUnit). Shows language ports like Rack/WSGI/PSGI and dozens of Sinatra clones (Nancy, Flask, Slim), highlights webmachine (Erlang → Ruby) and Cedar (RSpec style for iOS). Recommends copying intent not code: write acceptance testing against the original, then reimplement idiomatically in the target language.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00The ethics of stealing
- 1:26Lessons from music
- 8:56Software analogues
- 14:07Genealogy of frameworks
- 17:49Standardization and naming
- 23:06Motivations for borrowing
- 26:05Strategies for imitation
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