in reply to Death and Return of TIMTOWTDI

I think much depends on how much time you have to spend on something. If you have a deadline, you probably would do better to grab what you can and avoid reinventing the wheel. Much of the time we just don't have the luxury of time to play with something, which I think is one reason there is so much crappy commercial software out there - they had to beat the competition, so they couldn't do the testing they should have.

On the other hand, if you do have the time, I think it's a wonderful thing to reinvent the wheel. IMNSHO, it's the best way to really learn how to do things. I suppose it's like building something yourself, instead of buying it, or (in the case of CPAN) downloading it. Maybe your product isn't as flashy, nor as efficient; maybe it doesn't work nearly as well. But - it's yours. To me there is something highly satisfying about creating a product by myself, even if it's a poor shadow of what is already out there.

And you never know - you just might be the one who finds a better algorithm, or approaches the problem in a unique, original way that turns out to be better than what's already available. You probably aren't going to do this for pay, though. Your boss will want you to produce results, not art. It's up to the amateurs to make a piece of software that is not only effective, but also efficient and (ideally) elegant.

בּרוּך

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Re: Re: Death and Return of TIMTOWTDI
by dakedesu (Scribe) on Jun 02, 2004 at 02:25 UTC

    Well, maybe there should be something in this site's set of FAQs that should specify some way to let people know, in the question, or answer, if the post requires a deadline to be quite as relavent?

    As per reinventing the wheel. Hey, it brought us Linux and Open Office. It is something that much of GNU is built upon (for fear of companies like SCO). For things done only in spare time, wasn't that how Larry Wall originally released Perl? What about UNIX, wasn't that a part time thing for Ken Thompson? Just gather a nice ammount of example part time projects, and I am sure most bosses will know it might be a decent investment :)

    -- Jamie Payne
[reply]
      For things done only in spare time, wasn't that how Larry Wall originally released Perl?

      Nope. He was building a system to help two systems communicate across the country and let his laziness get the better of him.

[reply]
        I thought he was trying to process logs..?
[reply]

      As per reinventing the wheel . . . Linux . . . Open Office . . . GNU . . . Perl . . . UNIX . . .

      Each of those things were created because existing wheels were simply not round enough in one way or another. Linux was created because Tannenbaum wanted to spend his time as a professor, not as king of the hackers (as he himself put it in a recent essay). Open Office was simply an Open Source version of StarOffice, built out of a need for an office suite not made by Microsoft. GNU reinvented all kinds of wheels for mostly political reasons. Perl and Unix were created because of the ineffectiveness of existing tools.

      In my mind, there are two reasons for reinventing wheels, as the examples above show: 1) existing wheels are not good enough (either for technical or political reasons), or 2) you want to learn how to do it on your own.

      #2 is usually not relevent in a business environment, because its hard to justify to your boss that you should spend a lot of time coming up with a solution that someone else has already solved and is freely giving away. OTOH, it might be done during off-moments at work or other spare time. #1 will be the more likely case.

      ----
      send money to your kernel via the boot loader.. This and more wisdom available from Markov Hardburn.

[reply]

      Right - Linux, OpenOffice, Unix, C, even Perl, were all things that someone built in spite of there already being something similar out there. And the people did many of these things on their own, for the love of the work and not for the money. Come to think of it, even Einstein wrote his three major papers (including the special theory of relativity) in his spare time.

      In my experience, most bosses are too caught up in the so-called bottom line, that they overlook how much valuable stuff is done by people on their own. They usually can't see beyond the next financial report. But that's OK. Many of us do for fun what others wouldn't do for money. Getting paid would kind of take the fun out of it, IMNSHO.

      בּרוּך
[reply]

        I don't know... I've only read that Larry Wall wanted a better way for working with Sed and Awk than was available. Much is not easily accessible from before ~1992 when Larry Wall open sourced perl.

        As per Linux, I was pretty sure, that was also built out of the free time of Linus Torvalds, as a basement project to see if he could actually make something as good as Minix. Now, I know I will tick off the Minix users on this forum, but I think that Linus created something slightly better than Minix :)

        OpenOffice, I will agree with. Though that was more that Linux wanted to grow as a Desktop OS, rather than just as server OS. Unix and C grew together. New features in C allowed for new features in Unix. New features in Unix allowed for new features in C. C, was a logical extension of BPL(I think it was BPL), which never really grew in spite of languages... just an evolutionary matter.

        -- Jamie Payne
[reply]
      What about UNIX, wasn't that a part time thing for Ken Thompson?

      No, actually it was built by Ken Thompson out of AT&T's necessity for a multiuser, multiprocessing operating system to be used in-house for its own information processing department.

      -fp
[reply]

        I thought it was built by Ken Thompson out of the need for a system on which to play Adventure, and the availability of a system without an OS.

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