in reply to Re^5: Reinvent the wheel!
in thread Reinvent the wheel!

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.

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Re^7: Reinvent the wheel!
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Mar 23, 2009 at 19:17 UTC
    Your argument, if taken too far....

    Then don't take it too far.

    I have personally seen two very experienced CPAN authors (names almost everyone on this site recognizes, as they've written and maintained code used and recommended countless times) pursue a pointless rewrite of code intended for delivery to a customer the night before delivery.

    Did that cost my business something? You bet.

    Opportunity costs of reinvention are very real. They don't always happen, but software project management is the art of managing risk.

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