Posted by
Steve Smith on
Feb 21, 2014; 3:35pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/NTY-Buy-Apple-gadgets-use-Google-services-buy-media-from-Amazon-tp7584915p7584943.html
Marcus/Ray -
I agree wholeheartedly with both of you. I've encountered more than
enough of both NIH and stubborn re-invention, especially in the Academia
and the National Lab context.
This has been one of my biggest challenges as a mentor of young people
who have *plenty* of book learning but not much practical experience...
learning the balance between (motivated) learning and wasteful
re-invention.
I am *not* a trained engineer, though a few phases of my career I have
in fact done systems and software engineering. I am *most* interested
in exploration, discovery, and innovation and try to arrange my work
life so that such activities *are* appropriate.
Many of my (re)inventions are relatively subtle (I think). I was once
trying to expand on a set of graph analysis tools to do some consistent
comparison of complex graphs from a wide variety of disparate sources.
No one graph library really had the full suite of tools I needed and
even within a given library, the actual execution complexity (space and
time) were not consistent. Where I had source to review, I discovered
(unsurprisingly) that the libraries were collections thrown together
from more than one source (multiple graduate projects by different
students?). I even found some latent bugs in a few of them. The
only way to get consistent results was to in fact re-implement these
algorithms. This was well over 10 years ago before graph analysis
became so "en vogue".
What I tripped over in the process was the "Tree Heap" or "Treap"...
but I didn't trip over it by doing research... i tripped over it by
*needing* a data structure that had those properties, so I ended up
building one from whole cloth... only to discover months later that such
an data structure had already been devised. To add insult to injury, a
few years later, I was relating the story to a woman who had come to
work at LBL while I was there, and *she* was one of the original
discoverers/inventors of the Treap! It is truly a small world.
To make this relevant to the discussion... I don't think I could ever
have come to recognize the value of such a data structure if I *hadn't*
felt obliged to re-invent (re-implement?) a number of algorithms that
had already been implemented by others... to differing degrees of quality.
- Steve
> On 2/20/14, 5:47 PM, Parks, Raymond wrote:
>> However, the practical engineer in me wants to scream whenever
>> someone reinvents stupid ways to do things.
> It is indeed infuriating when someone makes no effort to learn about
> what the state-of-the-art is and imposes their ignorance and
> incompetence on other people. Being curious and fearless (motivated
> learning) is not the same thing as not-invented-here syndrome and
> being stubbornly illiterate.
>
> Marcus
>
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