Looking for precedents is always good advice, but the essential issue is that even if you don't re-invent the wheel, the "wheel" that works in functional progra

Looking for precedents is always good advice, but the essential issue is that even if you don't re-invent the wheel, the "wheel" that works in functional programming territory, for certain tasks (e.g. the binary tree with parent pointers), is more complicated, more verbose, and comes with downsides. People ignore existing work (at least at first), and assume they can make it simpler themselves, because they're surprised it _needs_ to be sophisticated. EDIT: That said, the article does a great job of explaining the problems and the potential solutions.