@samir I imagine if your definition of "pointless" expands to include "ripoffs of things that already exist" the number approaches 90%. I myself spent years writing "Instagram for beauticians" because the venture capitalists were willing to ignore "but why wouldn't the beauticians just use the Instagram they have at home?"

@jeremywadhams @samir a lot of programming is creating something which already exists just in a slightly different combination. That doesn't make it pointless. If only, gaining understanding is already extremely useful, often reinventing is the only way to get understanding

@gerbrand Oh absolutely, I wouldn't discourage a developer from reimplementing tic-tac-toe or building a blog CMS. And I wouldn't stop someone whose vision of a better mousetrap was 95% conventional thinking, but that 5% novelty is a banger! But it's discouraging how many meetings I've been in that are "competitor X has feature Y, we need a shallow clone of Y bodged into our product immediately!"