But we don't get anywhere by telling Picasso at an early age to stop messing with paints and go milk the goats because 'everything to know about art has already been learned by others'.

But surely there will be no giants at all if all we do is stamp out seeds where we find them.

That's a strawman argument, with very little connection to what I wrote. Surely my argument deserves more consideration than such callous dismissal!

And how exactly did these 'people' get that knowledge?

As I wrote in my original reply, by reading code, by examining prior art, by iteration and refinement, by reviewing the desires and needs of users.


In reply to Re^5: Reinvent the wheel! by chromatic
in thread Reinvent the wheel! by telemachus

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.