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In response to the first quote "Today’s developers have never learned about this history" I agree. I would love to see more CS history classes. I know that st

In response to the first quote "Today’s developers have never learned about this history" I agree. I would love to see more CS history classes. I know that star schema were a thing, and hierarchical databases were a thing, but I know nothing about them. I don't know what their failings were that led to dominance of RBDMSes. I'm very curious to know how similar they were to mongo or other current schemaless databases. There are also probably many old ideas that would be practical now, neural networks definitely fall into this category.

osullivj 8y ago
Strongly agreed. Exposure to a History & Philosophy of Software course might reduce the amount of wheel reinvention that plagues our industry.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  > Strongly agreed. Exposure to a History & Philosophy of Software course might reduce the amount of wheel reinvention that plagues our industry. I agree that wheel reinvention is an issue that needs addressing but not to the extent as you describe (a "plague"). I also believe this comment misunderstands why it happens. As it stands today, it is a feature, not a bug. You don't see reinvention a lot in traditional engineering disciplines because you have something concrete and functional that takes years of research and hours of construction. Any hacker with a laptop can pick up a language and start building stuff. This ease of access is what creates the "wheel reinvention" situation, that and an endless amount of choices and a limited amount of discoverability of what is out there. Exposure to history and philosophy of software would do nothing to address that. Finally, reinvention is seen as virtue in this industry, not a plague. To some degree, I agree: software is never complete. And even if you think so, the software built underneath your software may change, thus changing your software. Some level of reinvention may come with new considerations that were not considerations of the past.
cr0sh 8y ago
> I would love to see more CS history classes. It would be nice to see something like that. I'm not sure it will happen. Our human society in general - for some reason - has deemed that the history of "computation" - or however you want to put it...isn't important. Think about how many automobile museums there are in the world - or google it, whatever. Both public and private. You probably have several where you live - especially if you live in the United States (less so in Europe, even less elsewhere). Or museums about aircraft and aerospace - another technology that has fundamentally changed human society. Then compare those to the number of "computer history" museums. Despite the known fact that the computer has fundamentally changed our society in ways that are still not completely clear, and ongoing - we have done so little to preserve that history. Software is a large part of that as well...we have systematically destroyed, or have left to "bitrot" because "proprietary software" in some back room (or worse, in an unknown location because a company went out of business, or was purchased and re-purchased, etc). For instance - there are several Cray supercomputers out there - in private ownership and in museums - but have you ever tried to find the OS software or documentation in order to actually make one run? I'm not going to say it's impossible to find, but I wouldn't call it easy, either (a great resource for info on these old machines and software is the bitsavers archive). We ignore this history at our peril; there are numerous cases on both the hardware and software side of things of "reinventing the wheel" because this history isn't widely known or understood. In some cases, it's not even avoidable because the information that would prevent it is either not easily or widely available - or is non-existant period! In other cases, it may be available, but it just isn't widely known about or taught. I don't see this changing any time soon, unfortunately...

osullivj 8y ago

Strongly agreed. Exposure to a History & Philosophy of Software course might reduce the amount of wheel reinvention that plagues our industry.

jimmy1 8y ago
> Strongly agreed. Exposure to a History & Philosophy of Software course might reduce the amount of wheel reinvention that plagues our industry. I agree that wheel reinvention is an issue that needs addressing but not to the extent as you describe (a "plague"). I also believe this comment misunderstands why it happens. As it stands today, it is a feature, not a bug. You don't see reinvention a lot in traditional engineering disciplines because you have something concrete and functional that takes years of research and hours of construction. Any hacker with a laptop can pick up a language and start building stuff. This ease of access is what creates the "wheel reinvention" situation, that and an endless amount of choices and a limited amount of discoverability of what is out there. Exposure to history and philosophy of software would do nothing to address that. Finally, reinvention is seen as virtue in this industry, not a plague. To some degree, I agree: software is never complete. And even if you think so, the software built underneath your software may change, thus changing your software. Some level of reinvention may come with new considerations that were not considerations of the past.

cr0sh 8y ago

> I would love to see more CS history classes. It would be nice to see something like that. I'm not sure it will happen. Our human society in general - for some reason - has deemed that the history of "computation" - or however you want to put it...isn't important. Think about how many automobile museums there are in the world - or google it, whatever. Both public and private. You probably have several where you live - especially if you live in the United States (less so in Europe, even less elsewhere). Or museums about aircraft and aerospace - another technology that has fundamentally changed human society. Then compare those to the number of "computer history" museums. Despite the known fact that the computer has fundamentally changed our society in ways that are still not completely clear, and ongoing - we have done so little to preserve that history. Software is a large part of that as well...we have systematically destroyed, or have left to "bitrot" because "proprietary software" in some back room (or worse, in an unknown location because a company went out of business, or was purchased and re-purchased, etc). For instance - there are several Cray supercomputers out there - in private ownership and in museums - but have you ever tried to find the OS software or documentation in order to actually make one run? I'm not going to say it's impossible to find, but I wouldn't call it easy, either (a great resource for info on these old machines and software is the bitsavers archive). We ignore this history at our peril; there are numerous cases on both the hardware and software side of things of "reinventing the wheel" because this history isn't widely known or understood. In some cases, it's not even avoidable because the information that would prevent it is either not easily or widely available - or is non-existant period! In other cases, it may be available, but it just isn't widely known about or taught. I don't see this changing any time soon, unfortunately...