Don't Reinvent the Wheel
oscargodson.posterous.com
Don't Reinvent the Wheel
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#2This is one sided, there are many instances when people repeat the same process over and over again to get to get the same results. Improving something is not reinventing the wheel, building the exact same thing over and over again is.
Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#3Agree with the post but it's ignoring the countless number of people who decide to write their own library for X that adds nothing beyond what anything else already does.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Do invent a new type of wheel with more awesome.
Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#4It's nitpicky, but the second time I saw "itself" written as "it's self" I cringed extra-hard.
Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#5Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#6I think what the author is talking about is redesign and not reinvention. According to Wikipedia "Reinventing the wheel is a phrase that means to duplicate a basic method that has already previously been created or optimised by others".
What I understand and interpret is "method" implies "concept". Reinventing the "concept" of wheel does not make sense especially if your end product is not wheel but a car. The connotation here is more do with the focus than improving the current solution. If you fundamentally want to redefine the rolling motion of wheel with something else then I think the phrase applies more appropriately.
Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#7This is one sided, there are many instances when people repeat the same process over and over again to get to get the same results. Improving something is not reinventing the wheel, building the exact same thing over and over again is.
If it takes less time to do it again yourself than it does to find and understand someone else's solution is that so bad?
Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#8I think what the author is talking about is redesign and not reinvention. According to Wikipedia "Reinventing the wheel is a phrase that means to duplicate a basic method that has already previously been created or optimised by others". What I understand and interpret is "method" implies "concept". Reinventing the "concept" of wheel does not make sense especially if your end product is not wheel but a car. The connot…
I fully agree with this.
Moreover, the phrase "Don't reinvent the wheel" is not meant to stop you from reimplementing stuff. I just means that you should have a close look at what already exists before reimplementing it, so you don't follow the path of trials and errors that others have already gone for you. The best sign that someone reinvented the wheel is that the "new" stuff is completely inferior to what already exists. And this appears to happen quite often.
So in my experience, the phrase "Don't reinvent the wheel" is merely meant to counteract the NIH syndrome.
Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#9The author is taking the phrase too seriously. I think he has a problem with people misusing or over-using the phrase. I think don't reinvent the wheel is a great phrase when a particular action is futile with respect to a much bigger goal, and is often due to the negligence/naivety of the person who's not supposed to reinvent the wheel.
When I was working on my undergraduation project and building a chatbot, I was trying to make it smart by querying Wikipedia. I started writing a web scraper since I had no idea how else to do it (I was new to web programming at that point since I was a total C++ freak.) My prof told me, "Don't reinvent the wheel. Use the MediaWiki API or something like Beautiful Soup"
Re: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
#10[deleted]