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Re: Reinventing the wheel

by sundialsvc4 (Abbot)
on Nov 04, 2011 at 13:24 UTC ( [id://935935]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Reinventing the wheel

Yes, it really depends upon your project’s DFQ (Dissected-Frog Quotient), followed by your cauldron-burn and fire-bubble.   ;-)

Seriously:   “laziness and hubris” are virtues.

Just about everything that is ever done is more or less a reinvention of what someone else has done, and some of those things have indeed been significant improvements.   But a lot of time has been wasted over the years by folks who, having stumbled upon a “new” business requirement, just charge right into it without dissecting any frogs first.   They didn’t bother to look at CPAN, or simply didn’t know that it existed, or didn’t learn how to use it.   (Heck, they might not have really figured out what they were doing, CPAN or no!   “Cowabunga!!”)

It can go the other way, too.   I once watched a group of people who ought to know better, at a great big famous computer company that certainly should know better, suddenly decide that another language is “better than Perl, just because it’s different from Perl, Perl is old, etc.”   They quickly established that the other language de jour had packages too, but they didn’t actually stop to see if the packages in the other language actually proclaimed to do the same things.   (Nor, if they did so, whether the packages actually worked.)   Mumbling something trendy about “scrum” or somesuch, they abandoned their perfectly-good private offices, crowded into a classroom for six hours a day where they gave each other copies of the latest cold or flu, and toiled mightily(!) ... striving to replace Perl code that works with non-Perl code that doesn’t.   (I suppose they succeeded in that quest.)   :-/   But the project was dead-meat from the start, because although they had a project process (“scrum,” seemingly grabbed from the latest sexy-trendy textbook of the day), they didn’t have a project plan.

Thus ... my comment is actually serious.   This is engineering.   The guy who seems to be sitting on his asterisk in the air-conditioning, doing nothing but reading books in the library and drawing on pieces of paper all day, is the guy who’s actually working; not the ones who are assembling a great big structure out there in the heat.   Dissect those frogs!   Get out there and plan your project before you start on it.   Research what has already been done, thoroughly.   Methodically test the possibilities to see which one will move your project forward fastest and with the least risk.

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Re^2: Reinventing the wheel
by cavac (Parson) on Nov 10, 2011 at 11:11 UTC

    Yes, it really depends upon your project’s DFQ (Dissected-Frog Quotient), followed by your cauldron-burn and fire-bubble.

    You know, i think i just found a perfect quote for my next project meeting. I doubt many of my coworkers actually know their Shakespeare, though.

    Btw, it's "fire burn and cauldron bubble", not the other way around unless the project is based on reverse polish notation ;-)

    Don't use '#ff0000':
    use Acme::AutoColor; my $redcolor = RED();
    All colors subject to change without notice.

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