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by gprisament 5973 days ago
I find "Don't reinvent the wheel" to be a terrible idiom. Think about the wheel for a moment. Is the wheel on your bike the same as the wheel on your car, or on a train, or an an airplane? Of course they're all different! The wheel has been reinvented thousands of times, and we're better off for it!

Yes, it can be worthwhile to borrow successful concepts from other disciplines. But in many cases, the concrete implementation NEEDS to be reinvented in order to apply the abstract concept to a new purpose.
2 comments
MaysonL 5973 days ago
OK. How about "Don't build hexagonal wheels, unless you have a very unusual use case."
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anamax 5972 days ago
> The wheel has been reinvented thousands of times, and we're better off for it!

We're better off only for the reinventions that were actually improvements. Most of the reinventions weren't improvements.

Different is a disadvantage, a cost, that is worthwhile only in specific cases when the difference produces some advantages that more than make up the difference.

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