When the superior man refrains from acting, his force is felt
for a thousand miles.
--
Tao Te Ching (as popularly mistranslated)
Reluctance to do unnecessary work is a great virtue in
programmers. If the Chinese sage Lao-Tze were alive today and still
teaching the way of the Tao, he would probably be mistranslated as:
When the superior programmer refrains from coding, his force is felt
for a thousand miles. In fact, recent translators have suggested that
the Chinese term
wu-wei
that has
traditionally been rendered as “inaction” or
“refraining from action” should probably be read as
“least action” or “most efficient action” or
“action in accordance with natural law”, which is an even
better description of good engineering practice!
Remember the Rule of Economy. Re-inventing fire and the wheel
for every new project is terribly wasteful. Thinking time is precious
and very valuable relative to all the other inputs that go into
software development; accordingly, it should be spent solving new
problems rather than rehashing old ones for which known solutions
already exist. This attitude gives the best return both in the
“soft” terms of developing human capital and in the
“hard” terms of economic return on development
investment.
|
Reinventing the wheel is bad not only because it
wastes time, but because reinvented wheels are often square. There is an
almost irresistible temptation to economize on reinvention time by
taking a shortcut to a crude and poorly-thought-out version, which
in the long run often turns out to be false economy.
|
|
| --
Henry Spencer
|
|
The most effective way to avoid reinventing the wheel is to
borrow someone else's design and implementation of it. In other
words, to reuse code.
Unix supports reuse at every level from individual library
modules up to entire programs, which Unix helps you script and
recombine. Systematic reuse is one of the most important
distinguishing behaviors of Unix programmers, and the experience of
using Unix should teach you a habit of trying to prototype solutions
by combining existing components with a minimum of new invention,
rather than rushing to write standalone code that will only be used
once.
The virtuousness of code reuse is one of the great
apple-pie-and-motherhood verities of software development. But many
developers entering the Unix community from a basis of experience in
other operating systems have never learned (or have unlearned) the
habit of systematic reuse. Waste and duplicative work is rife, even
though it seems to be against the interests both of those who pay for
code and those who produce it. Understanding why such dysfunctional
behavior persists is the first step toward changing it.
