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.
You can spend all your time reinventing a worse wheel, or you can just use the highly optimised 20th gen wheel that already exists and actually finish a project
Optimized translates to, for a single use case.
The more form you give something, the narrower its uses become. Which is why innovative sites must spend years hatching schemes to work within “optimized” wheels. It’s why Google and Amazon have both created their own databases and left SQL behind. Because SQL is optimized for a very specific use case.
Then you get into other problems, like http(s). It was optimized for one-time connections, because you connect to something, send a request, get it, then the connection closes. Which lead to the need for WebRTC – which is an entire mess of its own, trying to get around that restriction.
Optimized means a use-case became narrower and narrower over time. One of the most reinvented things in history, other than the mousetrap, is the wheel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UfoM4UbLak
As with so many things, it depends on your goal.
If your goal is to make a new, never-before-seen kind of wheel, you definitionally must reinvent the wheel, but at that point, you are doing state of the art research into rolling system dynamics, and probably not hopping onto a message board to ask random strangers about it. You’re heading down the hall to your colleagues lab and consulting fellow experts in the field.
If your goal is to learn the rough outline of how a wheel works, because you want to learn to make wheeled vehicles, maybe you should ‘reinvent’ the wheel at least once, but just as an exercise, not because the wheel you reinvent will be useful. It will be cast aside anyway. You probably just need to know not to put tires on your trains or metal wheels on your F1 cars. If your goal is to reinvent the train, trust the people, who spent years and years of work, testing, reinventing, and retesting the wheel, have proven that round and metal is the way to go for train wheels, and spend your effort on making the train itself. Reinventing the wheels probably won’t make a better train and might stall out the making of the train entirely. If your goal is to get a job as a train designer, showing you know how to send specs to the wheel maker and trusting their work will get you hired where getting lost in the minutiae of designing your own unremarkable wheel will not. The people with the money want trains by the end of the day because they promised the client a week ago they’d be ready by yesterday and forgot to hire you until today.