Post programming questions online and you’ll inevitably get someone saying, “don’t reinvent the wheel.” Why is it so bad to step outside the box?
A few years back, one of my old high school teachers told me that none of his students asked him any questions during an AP math class. That they all just sat there like robots.
And when you question systems of authority and power structures, people always bring up, if you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. I literally just got called a Nazi for thinking it odd that Lemmy moderators should be able to limit your interactions from other Lemmy instances.
By keeping them indoors all the time, have we raised a generation of kids who question nothing? This isn’t normal, people. You’re supposed to question things, especially those with power over you. Humans are self-serving. That means your moderators, betters, and superiors will always serve their own interests over yours.
Am I reinventing the wheel when I use ext4 as a key value store instead of Redis? Or a sorted fixed-width binary file to lookup a relation instead of Sqlite?
I think for answering programming questions, the default answers are like a one-size fits all t-shirt. Yeah, they will always cover you up… but usually not “optimal.” Why is that? I think its because these are common solutions that everyone understands even though there are many ways to skin a cat.
It definitely leads to cargo culting.