How is it that articles like this not only get written, but get voted onto the front page of HN? It's not that the content is bad but that the content has been

How is it that articles like this not only get written, but get voted onto the front page of HN? It's not that the content is bad but that the content has been presented elsewhere, and numerous times, e.g. c2 wiki. Is it because we're not really engineers? We're just hackers? I feel like I've seen this discussion every five or ten years or so. Is that just my perception, or do we have waves of interest and knowledge building and then loose it all in some exodus from the industry every ten years that I'm not aware of? One of the threads here ended up exploding into yet another coding style "discussion", the kind I first remember back in 1995, and my attitude hasn't changed since then (just pick one and move forward). I can only imagine that as soon as B[1] was created, programmers started arguing about whether or not the curly brace should go on a new line. And that's the real problem here. We are still attempting massive engineering works using the tools of 1969: text files. We have graphical tools with automated assistants for finance, medicine, space flight, car design, but when it comes to the software that we programmers use to create that other software, it's 1969 text files with curly braces. No fucking wonder I keep seeing the same old shit. We should be in outer space right now, but we're still teaching the kids how to hold the sticks to make fucking fire. [0] http://wiki.c2.com/?SingleFunctionExitPoint http://wiki.c2.com/?SingleFunctionExitPoint [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)