There is a lot of hard-won knowledge that is aging out of the profession increasingly lately, I have been observing. It's tempting to blame web development, an

There is a lot of hard-won knowledge that is aging out of the profession increasingly lately, I have been observing. It's tempting to blame web development, and its proverbial low bar to entry, but I think the real problem is computer UX getting too good, such that you can accomplish almost anything one would desire with a computer, without having to delve into the nasty implementation details. I am just barely starting to get grey in my beard (largely from dealing with frighteningly incompetent consulting firms, rather than age...) but I can remember the eldritch incantations dealing with autoexec.bat and DOS memory modes, or the clusterfuck of trying to get printers or new bits of hardware to work, or the panic of trying to fix BSODs when I'd trashed the system installing something dodgy from LimeWire or the shovelware bin at WalMart. The next generation coming through has been shielded from these horrors, and mostly matured in an environment where computers work reliably; and when they do fail, it is usually opaque, inscrutable, and largely hidden from their eyes. Aside from a crash-course in the scientific method for diagnosing and debugging issues, the old dodgy software world exposed one rather harshly to many of the underlying realities of the system, and our current software environments are still mostly built on those foundations, with a few dozen layers of lipstick applied to the pig. It certainly doesn't help that most instruction in software engineering either hews to the abstract and theoretical or the novel, with passing consideration of the practical realities and the history of the art. Ultimately, we write code that runs on silicon transistors, not ideal Turing machines, and in a great many fields we are retreading extensively explored ground, a hamster wheel of innovation. Every generation seems to have to need to have a go at yet another build system or object database, or rediscover the model-view-controller pattern. We delight in making endless new and exciting and broken wheels, in shameful ignorance of the hard-won lessons of the past.