Reinventing the wheel

The inspiration for this idiomatic metaphor is that the wheel is an ancient archetype of human ingenuity (one so profound that it continues to underlie much of modern technology).

As it has already been invented and is not considered to have any inherent flaws, an attempt to reinvent it would add no value to it and be a waste of time, diverting the investigator's resources from possibly more worthy goals.

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.

[citation needed] An example would be to implement a quicksort for a script written in JavaScript and destined to be embedded in a web page.

Many problems contain subtleties that were resolved long ago in mainstream engineering (such as the importance of a wheel's rim being smooth).