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156:"Reinventing the wheel" may be an ironic cliche – it is not clear when the wheel itself was actually invented. The modern "invention" of the wheel might actually be a "re-invention" of an age-old invention. Additionally, many different wheels featuring enhancements on existing wheels (such as the many types of available tires) are regularly developed and marketed. The metaphor emphasizes understanding existing solutions, but not necessarily settling for them.
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of complex ideas. Rather than providing students simply with a list of known facts and techniques and expecting them to incorporate these ideas perfectly and rapidly, the instructor instead will build up the material anew, leaving the student to work out those key steps which embody the reasoning
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involves delaying a task if it is expected to be undertaken later. An example would be, "We don't want to preinvent the wheel" when discussing a solution to a problem when it is known that the solution is being developed elsewhere. It is not necessarily pejorative.
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which occurs when the engineer is unaware or contemptuous of the standard solution or does not understand the problem or the standard solution sufficiently to avoid problems overcome by the standard. It is mostly an affliction of inexperienced engineers, or the
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The phrase is sometimes used without derision when a person's activities might be perceived as merely reinventing the wheel when they actually possess additional value. For example, "reinventing the wheel" is an important tool in the
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is the practice of unnecessarily engineering artifacts that provide functionality already provided by existing standard artifacts (reinventing the wheel) and ending up with a worse result than the standard (a
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Additionally, those new to a language (and especially those new to programming) will often attempt to manually write many functions for which a more robust and optimized equivalent already exists in the
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Many problems contain subtleties that were resolved long ago in mainstream engineering (such as the importance of a wheel's rim being smooth). Anyone starting from scratch, ignoring the
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incompatibilities or around technical and policy limitations present in parts or modules provided by third parties. An example would be to implement a
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is the practice of coming up with new and often abstruse ways of describing things when the existing way of describing them was perfectly adequate.
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is to attempt to duplicate—most likely with inferior results—a basic method that has already previously been created or optimized by others.
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and software licensing issues. Reinventing the wheel in this case provides the missing functionality and also avoids copyright issues.
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or other easily available libraries. While this can be useful as a learning exercise, when done unknowingly the result is often less
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and destined to be embedded in a web page. The quicksort algorithm is well known and readily available from
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