Reinventing Wheels
From Hackers-IL
Re-inventing wheels has been a common theme of discussion in Hackers-IL and related forums. Re-inventing the wheel can mean several things:
- Re-implementing a piece of code from scratch where previous implementations are already available under a suitable license.
- Thinking of your own algorithm (or whatever) to solve a certain problem instead of looking for something in the scientific literature.
Among the many things that were said about it are:
- He who re-invents the wheel will understand much better how a wheel work.
- He who re-invents the wheel may actually invent a much better wheel.
- He who re-invents the wheel will likely design a square wheel, and then spend a year trying to figure out why it doesn't work.
- That ANSI C Programmers tend to re-invent the wheel more than programmers of many other languages (especially most Agile Languages).
Joel Spolsky has something to say about it in his In Defense of the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome article
