What counts as reinventing the wheel?

Posted by dsimcha on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by dsimcha
Published on 2011-03-06T21:44:08Z Indexed on 2011/03/07 0:17 UTC
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libraries

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code-reuse

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reinventing-the-wheel

Do the following scenarios count as "reinventing the wheel" in your book?

A solution exists, but not in the language you want to use, and existing solutions can't be interfaced with the language you want to use in a clean, idiomatic way.
In principle you could get an existing library to do what you wanted with heavy modification, but you think it would probably be easier to just start from scratch.
What you're writing has the same one-line description as stuff that's already been done, but you're targeting a different niche. For example, maybe your problem has been solved a zillion times before, but in a way that's inefficient for large datasets and your code works well for large datasets.

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