I've started from a series of opcodes and am building my way up to actual programs, and at each step of the way, I get these kind of "stop reinventing the wheel", or "isn't this a solved problem".
I feel like a lot of these people have somehow bought into the myth of progress, or think that we're somehow smarter than people of the past, or that we've ascended from the old problems.
We're both looking at each other like, you're the foolish one. Computer science is too young to calcify.