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I think our industry has become rife with people who don't know its history. So we get people "discovering" new ways of doing things that were known decades ag

I think our industry has become rife with people who don't know its history. So we get people "discovering" new ways of doing things that were known decades ago. Take for example "JAM stack", also known as basically the way web development was done 20 years ago. It is touted it as something new and exciting when it's only so if you don't understand the history of web development. Sure, JavaScript is used more now than it was back then but that doesn't make Jam Stack altogether new, does it? Likewise, statically typed languages aren't new and refreshing. They're just another way of solving a problem. Note I said they're "another way", not a "better way". They have their place (right tool for the job, etc...) but I think OP's point is that too many people think statically typed languages are better for everything and that's simply not the case. But one needs to understand the history of languages and programming in order to better appreciate the distinction and, more importantly, know which tool is the right one for the job.

Fice 7y ago
Pop culture, that's it. A rather known and obvious approach at web development needed a catchy name and dedicated promotional website so that webdevs know that's cool and trendy. Alan Kay said in 2004: «You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.» https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Fice 7y ago

Pop culture, that's it. A rather known and obvious approach at web development needed a catchy name and dedicated promotional website so that webdevs know that's cool and trendy. Alan Kay said in 2004: «You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.» https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523