Why the hell should anyone else give one flying fuig for whether I choose to re-invent a wheel, or legs, or mucus-lubricated, muscular wave locomotion?

Many apparently do, but why they do I have not the vaguest concept.

I can give a couple of simple reasons why I care enough about this issue to bother at least pointing people towards a publicly available wheel and encouraging them to have a go at it.

First, there is self-interest. If people are reinventing wheels, they are usually not contributing useful patches and ideas to CPAN. A strong CPAN makes my life easier. Also, it has been my experience that despite what you say about integration problems, reinventing wheels usually leads to wasted time, less functionality, and more bugs, all of which makes Perl look bad. I want Perl to look great, so there will be lots of fun jobs for me.

In a slightly wider sense, but still out of self-interest, I want it to be accepted that using open source components is a reasonable way to write applications because it's the way I like to write them. If everyone just rolls their own all the time and that becomes the norm, managers will think it's strange when I tell them I don't want to write the ten thousandth template engine from scratch.

Obviously you and every other Perl developer can do whatever they want to, but there are some simple and sensible reasons why I (and others) will continue to encourage people to use CPAN and not reinvent wheels.

In reply to Re: Re: Litmus test: It's ok to roll your own if... by perrin
in thread Litmus test: It's ok to roll your own if... by davido

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.