in which a hypothetical death occurs in order that a real one may be avoided

Say you're writing some Ruby code, and you come across a library that deserves consideration. It looks like it might come in handy, but you're not sure if it justifies the additional complexity it brings with it. You're wondering how heavy-weight it is.

When pondering such things, it can be helpful to come at it from a tactile perspective. Sure, there are tools like flog and saikuro that can give you all kinds of numbers about a piece of code, but sometimes you just want to know, "What would this code be like if I printed it all out and picked it up?" You can imagine the smell of freshly printed pages and think to yourself, "How would it feel to heft it from hand to hand?" or "Would I be able to bludgeon someone to death with it?"

I can't help you with the first two questions, but I wrote a library specially designed to answer the last:

Bludgeon is a tool which will tell you if a given library is so large that you could bludgeon someone to death with a printout of it.

Usage is simple:

$ bludgeon git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git
== rspec (git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git)
  Lines: 38698
  Pages: 773
You could bludgeon someone to death with a printout.

It's just a sudo gem install bludgeon away. I'm not saying you should never use a library that's big enough to be deadly; I'm just saying you should know.

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