Reinventing the wheel

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Reinventing the wheel is a phrase that means to duplicate a basic method that has long since been accepted and even taken for granted.

The inspiration for this idiomatic metaphor lies in the fact that the wheel is the archetype of human ingenuity, both by virtue of the added power and flexibility it affords its users, and also in the ancient origins which allow it to underlie much, if not all, of modern technology. As it is not considered to have any operational flaws, an attempt to reinvent it would be pointless and add no value to the object, and would be a waste of time, diverting the investigator's resources from possibly more worthy goals which his or her skills could advance more substantially.

At the same time, however, "reinventing the wheel" is an important tool in the instruction 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 characteristic of the field.

The phrase is sometimes used without derision, especially when the user applies it reflexively, possibly to indicate that although his or her activities might be perceived as merely reinventing the wheel, they actually possess additional value. This added value may work around software licensing incompatibilities or around technical limitations present in parts or modules provided by third-parties. An example would be to implement a quicksort for a script written in Javascript and destined to be embedded in a web page. The quicksort algorithm is well known and readily available from libraries for software developers writing general-purpose applications in C++ or Java but Javascript by default provides no such sorting algorithm. Hence, if a developer wants to use quicksort on his web page, he must "reinvent the wheel" by reimplementing the algorithm. He could conceivably copy it from another web page but then he could run into copyright and software licensing issues. Reinventing the wheel in this case provides the missing functionality and also avoids copyright issues.

"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 old age 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.

Related phrases

Reinventing the square wheel 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 square wheel). This is an anti-pattern 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 second-system effect.

Many problems contain subtleties which were resolved long ago in mainstream engineering (such as the importance of a wheel's rim being smooth). Anyone starting from scratch, ignoring the prior art, will naturally face these problems afresh, and to produce a satisfactory result they will have to spend time developing solutions for them (most likely the same solutions that are already well known). However, when reinventing the wheel is undertaken as a subtask of a bigger engineering project, rather than as a project in its own right hoping to produce a better wheel, the engineer often does not anticipate spending much time on it. The result is that an underdeveloped, poorly performing version of the wheel is used, when using a standard wheel would have been quicker and easier, and would have given better results.

Preinventing the wheel 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.^[1]

References

• Kemper, Steve, A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition, HarperCollins, ISBN ISBN 0-06-076138-5 
• Hershock, Peter D., A Buddhist Response to the Information Age, State University of New York Press, ISBN 0-7914-4232-2 

See also

• Custom made
• Not Invented Here