Jeff Atwood wrote a post earlier this month about Reinventing the Wheel, where he advocates it as a learning experience, or to make a better wheel.
The problem is that he mistakes the reason people say "Don't reinvent the wheel" - it's almost never because You can't come up with a better wheel - it's because you don't need a better wheel.
Unless your business is about compilers, or has a need for really tweaked compilers, you don't need to be writing compilers. Unless your business is about encryption, you don't need to be writing encryption routines. Unless your business is about email, you don't need to be writing an email client.
Given the breadth of computer science and programming, the odds are very high that you are not as well-versed in the topic as someone who specialized in the topic. Bruce Schneier has a "Doghouse" classification for companies that badly re-implement cryptography in their products.
Jeff does note that reinventing the wheel can be a good learning process, and gives a nod to Charles Moore rewriting drivers himself for use in Forth, but those are not common cases, and Moore's business was the language, so it was germane to him to make it as solid as possible.
Technorati Tags --
Software, SoftwareDevelopment, Computers, Programming
HTTP
No comments:
Post a Comment