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Comment by ukj | Hacker News Reader

The reason I re-invent wheels is because I don't know the idiom I need to Google for.

I know what I need. I don't know what it's called in English. It's faster to re-implement it than to learn the vocabulary.

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That's why Haskell's Hoogle [1] is amazing (at least during 7-week course at university). You type function signature and get already implemented functions.

[1] https://hoogle.haskell.org/

hoogle is great, but it gives you library functions. it won't teach you higher-level patterns like

  f <$> x <*> y <*> z

to "map a function over three values"

The flip side of the naming-things-is-hard adage in programming is that once you can name the problem you are having, the problem often evaporates before your eyes.

Defining the problem is half the solution ;)

This is a problem in general but especially in programming where people like to rename things that already exist. However, it's not exclusive to programming - when I hack my way through something ME or EE I ask the experts around me and they can usually tell me the proper name or point me to existing or very similar solutions.

#include <wheel.h>

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