alt Hacker NewsThis is only tangentially related but I often wonder about the nature of software and whether we made a mistake "standardizing" as much as we have.
I say this not because you're wrong - I'm sure that using built-in modules for .zip parsing is faster and easier! - but rather because I don't know whether or not it's worth knowing how to do that. In the AI days right now there's argument being had about whether learning any coding at all is valuable. My gut says it is, but I've also spent years learning before AI, so maybe it's a sunk cost fallacy.
Regardless, my feeling is that we haven't found the balance between what's worth making every programmer learn/implement themselves, and what's worth abstracting away. Maybe implementing a .zip parser gives you some kind of secret wisdom that makes your future work better?
I'd hardly consider it secret, or wisdom, but I can think of many problems involving ZIP files I've solved in the past that it wouldn't even have occured to me to pose if I hadn't understood the broad structure of ZIP files as a series of metadata/data pairs followed by an index containing a mostly redundant copy of the metadata.
In other words, solving the right problems, however inefficiently, will always be more useful than solving the wrong problems efficiently.