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Those same students and programmers should realize that yours is just one opinion among many. Your advice leans toward the "fungible cogs" school, where the capital crime is to expect others to learn something they don't already know.

That's still a widely held view, and maybe even a majority, but probably not on HN. (see pg's Beating the Averages essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

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> Your advice leans toward the "fungible cogs" school, where the capital crime is to expect others to learn something they don't already know.

Not following what you mean. Do you mean that I do expect people to learn stuff, or that I don't expect them to learn stuff in order to do their job?

> The best tool for this job was to improve the Ruby version by way of C extensions, or write a new C command that does this work for you, linking in the Git and SVN code directly. This has little to no new concepts, is straightforward, and would have given you the best compatibility and performance.

Favoring "little to no new concepts" at least suggests a bias against certain kinds of learning. Sometimes learning a new concept is the best way to solve a problem.

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