Bulldozer00's Blog

In Federico Biancuzzi’s “Masterminds Of Programming“, UML co-creator Jim Rumbaugh states:

The computing field has a lot of people that think very well of themselves and seem to forget that there is any past to build upon. A lot of people keep reinventing things that have already been discovered. – Jim Rumbaugh

LOL! I understand what Jim’s saying, but there can be another reason for reinventing the wheel too. How many slightly different API versions of virtually similar “reusable” libraries are littered around your software development org? How many of them have you written and rewritten yourself?

If a library/module/component is poorly or “un” documented in terms of its design, external dependencies, and most importantly, usage examples, it t’aint gonna be reused. Even if  the thang IS miraculously well documented, if the info is not integrated, organized, and easily accessible, it ain’t gonna be reused either. Both of these shortcomings, which are highly likely since most programmers don’t “do documentation” and managers don’t want to pay for non-camouflage documentation, guarantee reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Assume that you truly do want to reuse someone else’s code to save time, but all you have is the source code. You’re gonna have to pour through the mess to figure out what it offers, how it works, and what other components and libraries it depends on before you can consider using it “as is“. The larger and denser the component, the deeper and wider the inheritance tree, the more external dependencies, the more frustrated you’ll become and the less likely you’ll apply your brainpower and time to the task at hand. When that happens, Ta Dah, it’s time to roll your own – yet again. Hell, if you don’t document your own stuff, you might not even be able to eat your own dog food downstream. D’oh! I hate when that happens. And yes, it happens to me.