Where do the little libraries belong?

Why are we at the mercy of languages’ core libraries?

There is a program we ask of Java programmers in interviews sometimes, just as an initial sanity check to make sure the candidate really knows the language:

“Write a method that accepts a List and returns a copy of the list with duplicate elements removed.”

It’s mostly just a test of whether they know how to use a hash set. Ignoring order, all we’re looki…