Reinventing the square wheel
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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 and also 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.
Here is an example of reinventing the square wheel, written in BASIC:
dim i = 1 again: print i i = i + 1 if i <= 10 goto again end
An easier and more readable solution would have been:
dim i
for i = 1 to 10
print i
next i
end
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 given better results.
