Remember the Computer Science Past Or Be Condemned To Repeat It?

theodp writes "In the movie Groundhog Day, a weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again. It's a tale to which software-designers-of-a-certain-age can relate. Like Philip Greenspun, who wrote in 1999, 'One of the most painful things in our culture is to watch other people repeat earlier mistakes. We're not fond of Bill Gates, but it still hurts to see Microsoft struggle with problems that IBM solved in the 1960s.' Or Dave Winer, who recently observed, 'We marvel that the runtime environment of the web browser can do things that we had working 25 years ago on the Mac.' And then there's Scott Locklin, who argues in a new essay that one of the problems with modern computer technology is that programmers don't learn from the great masters. 'There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design,' Locklin writes. 'Modern programmers seem more familiar with Lady Gaga. It's not just a matter of taste and an appreciation for genius. It's a matter of forgetting important things.' Hey, maybe it's hard to learn from computer history when people don't acknowledge the existence of someone old enough to have lived it, as panelists reportedly did at an event held by Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us last Friday!"

Comments

Re:We don't shun those who should be shunned.

[symbolset]

These guys were openly publishing their brilliance before hiding how your shit works was even a thing. Believe it or not once upon a time if you invented a brilliant thing in code you shared it for others to build upon so you could learn and grow and benefit. Hiding it for profit wasn't even thought of yet. It wasn't just undesirable: the thought did not even occur. That was the golden age of much progress, as each genius built upon the prior - standing upon the shoulders of giants reaching for fame. Now that we're in a hiding era we go around and around reinventing the same shit over and over, suing each other over who invented it first. It is madness. In the process we have moved backwards, losing decades of developed wisdom.

Another interpretation

[wanax]

I've always felt like that quotation had another interpretation, one that's much more favorable to the MPs:

If you're an MP, you've probably had to deal with a lot of people asking for money to fund what is essentially snake oil. If you don't understand the underlying 'cutting edge' technology (both plausible and acceptable), one simple test is to ask a question that you KNOW if the answer anything other than "No" that the person is bullshitting, and you can safely ignore them... and as reported the question is phrased in such a way that it would sorely tempt any huckster to oversell their device. I think Babbage's lack of comprehension was due to his inability to understand the idea that the MP was questioning HIM, rather than the device.

Re:It's not the programmers making the decisions

[TheRaven64]

There was a point made at the 30-year retrospective talk at last year's European Smalltalk conference. If you have two languages, one of which allows developers to be more efficient, then you will end up needing fewer developers for the same amount of work. Unless your entire company uses this language and never experiences mergers, then this group of developers will be outnumbered. When you begin a new project or merge two projects, management will typically decide to pick the language that more developers have experience with. If you have a team of 100 C++ programmers and another team of one SilverBulletLang programmers, then it seems obvious that you should pick C++ for your next project because you have vastly more experience within the company in using C++. The fact that the one SilverBulletLang programmer was more productive doesn't matter. In the real world, languages tend not to be silver bullets and so the productivity difference is more in the factor of two to five range, but that's still enough that the less-productive language wins.