2140: Reinvent the Wheel - Revision history

Elektrizikekswerk: /* Explanation */ An improvement is no reinvention.

2024-06-06T07:40:02Z

‎Explanation: An improvement is no reinvention.

162.158.186.71: /* Trivia */ idiom

2023-10-20T22:21:56Z

‎Trivia: idiom

162.158.186.71: /* Trivia */ cat

2023-10-20T22:21:23Z

‎Trivia: cat

FaviFake at 09:02, 24 July 2023

2023-07-24T09:02:09Z

FaviFake: Fixed category name (it was a redirect)

2023-05-29T17:14:11Z

Fixed category name (it was a redirect)

172.70.90.227: Undo revision 286109 by 162.158.107.230 (talk) Borderline, but another odd irrelevent intervention from the direction of our recent spam-monger.

2022-06-03T18:37:16Z

Undo revision 286109 by 162.158.107.230 (talk) Borderline, but another odd irrelevent intervention from the direction of our recent spam-monger.

162.158.107.230: /* Explanation */

2022-06-03T17:26:32Z

‎Explanation

Davidy22: Reverted edits by Explain xkcd server admin (talk) to last revision by Lumpman2

2022-05-21T02:55:00Z

Reverted edits by Explain xkcd server admin (talk) to last revision by Lumpman2

Show changes

Explain xkcd server admin at 21:46, 20 May 2022

2022-05-20T21:46:24Z

Show changes

Lumpman2: Undo revision 265988 by 👖🔥 (talk)

2022-05-11T17:51:52Z

Undo revision 265988 by 👖🔥 (talk)

Show changes

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 ==Explanation==
-"{{w|Reinventing the wheel}}" is an idiom/metaphor that refers to duplicate effort to recreate something that has already been created or perfected previously without adding any value in the process. The phrase relates to the idea that the round {{w|wheel}} was invented a long time ago and there is no way to make it better, as a circle is the most optimal shape. While the phrase includes the word "wheel", it isn't typically directly associated with the wheel but instead uses the word "wheel" because of the easily understandable meaning - a simple object with no improvements that can be made. That being said, we have actually reinvented the wheel at one point in time - a {{w|tire}} is a modern improvement to the wheel, which reduces bumps and shocks that people in the car would feel from uneven road surfaces.
+"{{w|Reinventing the wheel}}" is an idiom/metaphor that refers to duplicate effort to recreate something that has already been created or perfected previously without adding any value in the process. The phrase relates to the idea that the round {{w|wheel}} was invented a long time ago and there is no way to make it better, as a circle is the most optimal shape. While the phrase includes the word "wheel", it isn't typically directly associated with the wheel but instead uses the word "wheel" because of the easily understandable meaning.
-In this comic, [[Beret Guy]] works for an automotive company (or this is his [[:Category:Beret Guy's Business|own company]]), and he is explaining to Ponytail their decision to not reinvent the wheel for the automobiles that they produce, using the phrase in a literal sense instead of figuratively.  Instead of determining for themselves what wheel to use, they want to use whichever wheel is presumably considered the "best" wheel by the world, using a daily Google image search for "wheel" to determine the highest ranked wheel, and then using that wheel on the vehicles they produce that day. In reality, this would be a very bad way of choosing the wheels of the automobiles Beret Guy's company produces. In addition to being extremely inefficient, as they might have to change the wheels they use every day, it may also result in copyrights and lawsuits against his company.
+In this comic, [[Beret Guy]] works for a company (or this is his [[:Category:Beret Guy's Business|own company]]) that produces vehicles, and he is explaining to Ponytail their decision to not reinvent the wheel for their products, using the phrase in a literal sense instead of figuratively. Instead of determining for themselves what wheel to use, they want to use whichever wheel is presumably considered the "best" wheel by the world, using a daily Google image search for "wheel" to determine the highest ranked wheel, and then using that wheel on the vehicles they produce that day. In reality, this would be a very bad way of choosing the wheels of the automobiles Beret Guy's company produces. In addition to being extremely inefficient, as they might have to change the wheels they use every day, it may also result in copyrights and lawsuits against his company.
-The point of the comic is to make fun of programmers who take the idea that you should never reinvent the wheel too seriously. When these people have a problem, they may Google to find a solution to that problem, and when they find a piece of online code, they use it in their own code, even if it wasn't initially designed to handle the task for which it is being used and thus may have unintended side effects or other issues.
+The point of the comic is to make fun of programmers or engineers in general who take the idea that you should never reinvent the wheel too seriously. When these people have a problem, they may Google to find a solution to that problem, and when they find a piece of online code, they use it in their own code, even if it wasn't initially designed to handle the task for which it is being used and thus may have unintended side effects or other issues.
 Another way that programmers may go too far in avoiding reinventing the wheel is in using external dependencies. It can be valuable to use external libraries, especially for applications where certain tasks have strange edge cases that a 'reinvention' is likely to miss or require lots of development effort to correctly implement (like [https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time time]). However, using someone else's code means taking on the risk of security vulnerabilities, and when the library is updated on live installations, the user also takes on the risk that the library might become unavailable or otherwise break.  In this case, Beret Guy's company updates their wheel "library" on a daily basis from Google's image search. Google is unlikely to shut down a core search product, but they might change the API that Beret Guy's company uses (unless he's just going to their website himself), and they have been known to shut down projects that people like, such as [https://www.google.com/reader/about/ Google Reader]. On the day this comic was released, Randall changed the [[Design_of_xkcd.com#Header_text|Header text]] of xkcd, adding a [[Header text#2019-04-23_-_Google_Reader|reference to Google Reader]].

@@ Line 36: / Line 36: @@
 {{comic discussion}}
 [[Category:Comics featuring Beret Guy]]
 [[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
 [[Category:Beret Guy's Business]]
 [[Category:Google Search]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:21, 20 October 2023
Line 39:		Line 39:
	[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]		[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
	[[Category:Beret Guy's Business]]		[[Category:Beret Guy's Business]]
		+	[[Category:Google Search]]

@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 The point of the comic is to make fun of programmers who take the idea that you should never reinvent the wheel too seriously. When these people have a problem, they may Google to find a solution to that problem, and when they find a piece of online code, they use it in their own code, even if it wasn't initially designed to handle the task for which it is being used and thus may have unintended side effects or other issues.
-Another way that programmers may go too far in avoiding reinventing the wheel is in using external dependencies.  It can be valuable to use external libraries, especially for applications where certain tasks have strange edge cases that a 'reinvention' is likely to miss or require lots of development effort to correctly implement (like [https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time time]).  However, using someone else's code means taking on the risk of security vulnerabilities, and when the library is updated on live installations, the user also takes on the risk that the library might become unavailable or otherwise break.  In this case, Beret Guy's company updates their wheel "library" on a daily basis from Google's image search.  Google is unlikely to shut down a core search product, but they might change the API that Beret Guy's company uses (unless he's just going to their website himself), and they have been known to shut down projects that people like, such as [https://www.google.com/reader/about/ Google Reader].  On the day this comic was released, Randall changed the [[Design_of_xkcd.com#Header_text|Header text]] of xkcd, adding a [[header_text#2019-04-23_-_Google_Reader|reference to Google Reader]].
+Another way that programmers may go too far in avoiding reinventing the wheel is in using external dependencies. It can be valuable to use external libraries, especially for applications where certain tasks have strange edge cases that a 'reinvention' is likely to miss or require lots of development effort to correctly implement (like [https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time time]). However, using someone else's code means taking on the risk of security vulnerabilities, and when the library is updated on live installations, the user also takes on the risk that the library might become unavailable or otherwise break.  In this case, Beret Guy's company updates their wheel "library" on a daily basis from Google's image search. Google is unlikely to shut down a core search product, but they might change the API that Beret Guy's company uses (unless he's just going to their website himself), and they have been known to shut down projects that people like, such as [https://www.google.com/reader/about/ Google Reader]. On the day this comic was released, Randall changed the [[Design_of_xkcd.com#Header_text|Header text]] of xkcd, adding a [[Header text#2019-04-23_-_Google_Reader|reference to Google Reader]].
 The popular programming language Python manages external dependencies with packages called "wheels" which are "published to the cheese shop", which may or may not be an intended reference.
@@ Line 32: / Line 32: @@
 *On the day this comic came out a Google search on Wheel would in some cases have a bicycle wheel at the top:
 :[[File:2140_Reinvent_the_Wheel_Google_Search_Wheel.png|400px]]
-*The JavaScript development community has had several security and reliability incidents caused by over-dependence on automated package updates.  In 2016, a JavaScript developer [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/ un-published several libraries] (including one "library" which was just an eleven-line function for padding strings, which was nevertheless included in thousands of projects and downloaded millions of times a month) from the npm package repository.  This broke projects that depended on them and, until npm un-un-published his packages (with new maintainers), also opened the possibility that a bad actor could register malicious projects under those names and hijack all of their dependents.  In July 2018, an attacker gained access to the npm account of an ESLint maintainer and [https://eslint.org/blog/2018/07/postmortem-for-malicious-package-publishes published malicious versions of their packages], and in September 2018, the event-stream library was taken over by a malicious maintainer who [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/26/npm_repo_bitcoin_stealer/ added code to look for and steal bitcoins from the users who installed it].
+*The JavaScript development community has had several security and reliability incidents caused by over-dependence on automated package updates.  In 2016, a JavaScript developer [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/ un-published several libraries] (including one "library" which was just an eleven-line function for padding strings, which was nevertheless included in thousands of projects and downloaded millions of times a month) from the npm package repository.  This broke projects that depended on them and, until npm un-un-published his packages (with new maintainers), also opened the possibility that a bad actor could register malicious projects under those names and hijack all of their dependents. In July 2018, an attacker gained access to the npm account of an ESLint maintainer and [https://eslint.org/blog/2018/07/postmortem-for-malicious-package-publishes published malicious versions of their packages], and in September 2018, the event-stream library was taken over by a malicious maintainer who [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/26/npm_repo_bitcoin_stealer/ added code to look for and steal bitcoins from the users who installed it].
 {{comic discussion}}

@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 The point of the comic is to make fun of programmers who take the idea that you should never reinvent the wheel too seriously. When these people have a problem, they may Google to find a solution to that problem, and when they find a piece of online code, they use it in their own code, even if it wasn't initially designed to handle the task for which it is being used and thus may have unintended side effects or other issues.
-Another way that programmers may go too far in avoiding reinventing the wheel is in using external dependencies.  It can be valuable to use external libraries, especially for applications where certain tasks have strange edge cases that a 'reinvention' is likely to miss or require lots of development effort to correctly implement (like [https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time time]).  However, using someone else's code means taking on the risk of security vulnerabilities, and when the library is updated on live installations, the user also takes on the risk that the library might become unavailable or otherwise break.  In this case, Beret Guy's company updates their wheel "library" on a daily basis from Google's image search.  Google is unlikely to shut down a core search product, but they might change the API that Beret Guy's company uses (unless he's just going to their website himself), and they have been known to shut down projects that people like, such as [https://www.google.com/reader/about/ Google Reader].  On the day this comic was released, Randall changed the [[Design_of_xkcd.com#Header_text|Header text]] of xkcd, adding a [[xkcd_Header_text#2019-04-23_-_Google_Reader|reference to Google Reader]].
+Another way that programmers may go too far in avoiding reinventing the wheel is in using external dependencies.  It can be valuable to use external libraries, especially for applications where certain tasks have strange edge cases that a 'reinvention' is likely to miss or require lots of development effort to correctly implement (like [https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time time]).  However, using someone else's code means taking on the risk of security vulnerabilities, and when the library is updated on live installations, the user also takes on the risk that the library might become unavailable or otherwise break.  In this case, Beret Guy's company updates their wheel "library" on a daily basis from Google's image search.  Google is unlikely to shut down a core search product, but they might change the API that Beret Guy's company uses (unless he's just going to their website himself), and they have been known to shut down projects that people like, such as [https://www.google.com/reader/about/ Google Reader].  On the day this comic was released, Randall changed the [[Design_of_xkcd.com#Header_text|Header text]] of xkcd, adding a [[header_text#2019-04-23_-_Google_Reader|reference to Google Reader]].
 The popular programming language Python manages external dependencies with packages called "wheels" which are "published to the cheese shop", which may or may not be an intended reference.