Your argument, if taken too far, would ultimately lead to the claim that the time spent by an absolute beginner going through the exercises in an introductory textbook could have been better spent writing production code!

Really you only "lose something" if two assumptions hold:

  1. The perl hacker in question already knows enough to write a CPAN module you'd want to use; and
  2. The perl hacker in question does not learn anything from the exercise that s/he might use in future to create even better modules.

Unless you can prove that both of these are the case -- and the second, I think, is close to unprovable -- then you have no reason to assume that you have lost anything.

In reply to Re^6: Reinvent the wheel! by Porculus
in thread Reinvent the wheel! by telemachus

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