http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=929148


in reply to I know I'm not alone in this

I've read all this before. snakes and ladders So I'm not sure what the point of this is.

I know I'm not alone in this position. I've heard it said that most perl programmers hand roll their own solutions.

Unfortunately, I do see this often. Too much ego or just ignorance in the Perl developer community. Forget Perl, too many lazy developers in general would rather creatively solve problems already solved than solve problems not yet solved, because that's really hard.

I know it's easy to just assume that EVERYONE who does so is going to come up with something which is of significantly lesser quality than the established systems. But then that is a generalisation, and sometimes it's going to be wrong... completely and totally dead wrong.

I think that's not accurate. Many times that reinvented wheel does work better. Does it matter? Not really. The old wheel was round, it turned. It was good enough. But we didn't really need to improve gas mileage, we really needed to stop using fossil fuels. Because then we would really be making progress.

So maybe the assumption is not necessarily that the new wheel will be of lesser quality, but certainly there's some amount of assumption that the reinventor of that wheel isn't really community-minded or interested in working toward the greater good.

Now when reinventor starts asking for help because the new wheel isn't working out so great, they are now attempting to drain resources from the greater good. Now we're not just ignoring the greater good and not contributing to it, we're taking people's time away from it too. So yeah, there will be some resistance there. Some of the more kind hearted will see an opportunity to recruit reinventor toward the light and working toward the greater good. Others more jaded from past experience...well. Responses will clearly be mixed.

Now when reinventor starts bashing and insulting the community for not helping fix his wheel the way he demands they do... W-T-F man.

But I digress. Again. It's all been said before.

--Dave