If nobody ever bothered to reinvent the wheel, we would still be driving around on stone wheels with wooden pegs. I'm happy to see people take a new crack at an old problem, because sometimes they actually come up with something astoundingly new. Naivety can be an asset, without it most people would never undertake seemingly impossible tasks and would just stick with the status-quo.

There are many historical examples about how rethinking an old problem that has been "solved" has yielded fundamental breakthroughs. One is the halogen lightbulb, which is really just a new twist on an old idea, but with incredible benefits.

Some of the CPAN modules out there that have already invented the wheel are so old, or poorly implemented, that they can hardly be considered for some applications, especially commercial ones. This is only because there are so many modules, some good, some bad, and of course, some ugly.

Software bio-diversity is important for real innovation.