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To reinvent the wheel is to duplicate a basic method that has already previously been created or optimized by others. The inspiration for this idiomatic metaphor lies in the fact that the wheel is the archetype of human ingenuity, both by virtue of the added power and flexibility it affords its users, and also in the ancient origins which allow it to underlie much, if not all, of modern technology. As it has already been invented, and is not considered to have any operational flaws, an attempt to reinvent it would be pointless and add no value to the object, and would be a waste of time, diverting the investigator's resources from possibly more worthy goals which their skills could advance more substantially. The phrase is sometimes used without derision, when a person's activities might be perceived as merely reinventing the wheel, when they actually possess additional value. For example, "reinventing the wheel" is an important tool in the instruction of complex ideas. Rather than providing students simply with a list of known facts and techniques and expecting them to incorporate these ideas perfectly and rapidly, the instructor instead will build up the material anew, leaving the student to work out those key steps which embody the reasoning characteristic of the field. "Reinventing the wheel" may be an ironic cliche – it is not clear when the wheel itself was actually invented. The modern "invention" of the wheel might actually be a "re-invention" of an age-old invention. Additionally, many different wheels featuring enhancements on existing wheels (such as the many types of available tires) are regularly developed and marketed. The metaphor emphasizes understanding existing solutions, but not necessarily settling for them. ==In software development== In software development, reinventing the wheel is often necessary in order to work around software licensing incompatibilities or around technical limitations present in parts or modules provided by third parties. An example would be to implement a quicksort for a script written in JavaScript and destined to be embedded in a web page. The quicksort algorithm is well known and readily available from libraries for software developers writing general-purpose applications in C++ or Java, but some Javascript implementations do not provide this specific algorithm. Hence, if a developer wants to reliably use quicksort on his web page, he must "reinvent the wheel" by reimplementing the algorithm. He could conceivably copy it from another web page, but then he could run into copyright and software licensing issues. Reinventing the wheel in this case provides the missing functionality and also avoids copyright issues. Additionally, those new to a language (and especially those new to programming) will often attempt to manually write many functions for which a more robust and optimized equivalent already exists in the standard library or other easily available libraries. While this can be useful as a learning exercise, when done unknowingly the result is often less readable, less reliable and less optimized software which takes longer to write and debug. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「reinventing the wheel」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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