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Seriously, can we stop fetishising old approaches and papers? Yes, there's some tricks we've missed along the way, but there's a thread of alchemical thinking i
by moomin 10y ago
Seriously, can we stop fetishising old approaches and papers? Yes, there's some tricks we've missed along the way, but there's a thread of alchemical thinking in our community that is just plain unproductive.
- clock_tower 10y ago> there's a thread of alchemical thinking in our community You write that as if Lisp isn't the Philosopher's Stone. :)
- moomin 10y agoLOL. Yeah, The Clojure community has a bit of that as well, but it's married to a genuine interest in stealing great ideas from new papers and other languages.
- kaosjester 10y agoIt would be easier to take this comment seriously if Go wasn't a modern re-implementation of ALGOL 68.
- Ericson2314 10y ago60s regex with 60s language. Hmm, I wonder which area (regular language parsing or programming theory) has seen more research since then :D.
- papaf 10y agoI think your argument would have more weight if this presentation wasn't sharing the front page with the story about a 9.6 inch IPad that has 100s of comments. What Apple does next is a tech fetish. Personally, I'd rather read about regexps. We have a word for reading about old techniques where I am from -- we call it "learning".
- kmicklas 10y ago> Seriously, can we stop fetishising old approaches and papers? The entire existence of Go is predicated on fetishizing old approaches, unfortunately.
- mikeash 10y agoI'm not sure if I've ever seen someone fetishizing old approaches without ample justification for it, whereas unnecessarily reinventing the wheel happens constantly. If our community has a problem in this area, it's that we don't pay enough attention to the old ways.