Re: Guis, Processes, Threads, Simplicity - A Personal Manifesto

> On Mon, 4 May 2009, John Carter wrote:
>
>>  * Never write a sort. The library ones are better.
>>  * Never write (yet another) linked list implementation if
>>    malloc/realloc will do.
>>  * Never write an editor. It'll will suck your soul, and then still
>> suck.
>>  * Never write an interpretor. Use a standard scripting language, they
>>    are _much_ better, more powerful, well documented and less buggy.
>
> Do you know what the first wheels looked like? They sucked. Somewhere
> along the line, there are people who really do reinvent wheels and it
> makes better wheels that you are using every day.
>
Sure. But how round can you get them?
At some point it no longer matter whether the wheel is just a tiny bit
more perfect.
And for most purposes the standard library routines will indeed trump
anything you (or most people alone) can come up with in a reasonable
amount of time.

> do it just because they feel like it... NIH vanity, or a manner to
> self-train, or just a sense of adventure, or... yes, some people reinvent
> wheels simply because they don't want to look for a wheel in the first
> place.
>
Vanity mostly. Or lack of familiarity with what's available in the
standard libraries. If you don't know it's there are are of the mindset
that documentation is for loosers, you're bound to reimplement a lot of
things others have done before you and likely better than what you'd come
up with yourself.