Honestly "don't reinvent the wheel" makes absolutely no sense as a saying. We're not still all using wooden discs as wheels, we have invented much better wheels since the neolithic. Why shouldn't we do the same with software?
Quoted keys, strict comma rules, very limited data types, are the main ones. There are a host of others if you view it through the lenses of user-read/write, and a different set of issues if you view it as a machine data interface. Trying to combine the two seems fundamentally misguided.
Lack of comments seems like a big one seeing as it's so widely used for "configuration". It's a big enough downside that VSCode and others have violated it via ad-hoc extensions of the format.
The comma rules introduce diff noise on unrelated lines.
Standards do die off, up to a point. XML is widely used but the last time I really had to edit it in anger working in DevOps/web/Python was a long time ago (10 years ago?).
At this point XML is the backbone of many important technologies that many people won't use or won't use directly anymore.
This wasn't the case circa 2010, when I doubt any dev could have really avoided XML for a bunch of years.
Probably the world's most over-used and misused comic strip. JSON wasn't created as a response to a situation where there were too many data interchange standards.
Right, wheels are reinvented every few years. Compare tires of today to the ones 20 years ago and the technology and capability is very different, even though they look identical to a casual eye.
My primary vehicle has off-road capable tires that offer as much grip as a road-only tire would have 20-25 years ago, thanks to technology allowing Michelin to reinvent what a dual-purpose tire can be!
> In the last decade, the spiciest street-legal tires have nearly surpassed the performance of a decade-old racing tire, and computer modeling is a big part of the reason
I always took this saying as meaning that we don’t re-invent the concept of the wheel. For example the Boring company and Tesla hoping to reinvent the concept of the bus/train.. (iirc your car goes underground on some tracks and you get to bypass traffic and not worry about steering)
A metal wheel is still just a wheel. A faster package manager is still just a package manager.
I also like Dan Luu's take (starting with a Joel Spolsky quote)
“Find the dependencies — and eliminate them.” When you're working on a really, really good team with great programmers, everybody else's code, frankly, is bug-infested garbage, and nobody else knows how to ship on time.
We had a similar attitude, although I'd say that we were a bit more humble. We didn't think that everyone else was producing garbage but, we also didn't assume that we couldn't produce something comparable to what we could buy for a tenth of the cost. From talking to folks at some competitors, there was a pretty big cultural difference between how we operated and how they operated. It simply didn't occur to them that they didn't have to buy into the standard American business logic that you should focus on your core competencies, that you can think through whether or not it makes sense to do something in-house on the merits of the particular thing instead of outsourcing your thinking to a pithy saying.[0]
I came here to (wrongly) say that wooden disks were never used as wheels, and that ot all started with spokes.
Some checking showed that, in fact, the oldest known wheels have a lot of solid disks. E.g: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_Marshes_Wheel
Hopefully this can disabuse others of similar mistaken memory.
