I'm also dependent on a bunch of advanced libraries and compilers I didn't write. I could reimplement them if I took years to do it but it would be a total waste of time.
>I'm also dependent on a bunch of advanced libraries and compilers I didn't write.
Two different kinds of dependence here: one is taking advantage of a pre-existing tool to perform some set of tasks. The other is there to outsource your thinking over concepts you are not able to reason about yourself.
I'm also outsourcing computational geometry to CGAL and CPU optimizations to GCC, so what? I can still reason about them.
For example for a problem I had recently Claude pointed out (after some prodding for me) that the determinant of the Jacobian of a function I'm interested in is a polynomial in polar coordinates, so I used a fancy root finding library (which I also didn't write) to solve it efficiently.
