Weak article. I thought he would talk about some more examples. And then talk about the difficulties in learning a library vs. rolling your own. Easy-to-copy code (MD5) was copied. Well duh.

Lots of people have talked here about the difficulty in reusing OpenSSL. I once had the distinct displeasure of trying to reuse ffmpeg as a library.

In addition, why must every language have it's own standard library. Is it possible to have a source code format for standard libraries which can translated into other languages?

There's a good article waiting to be written about this topic, but this is not it.